Xilinx FPGA Design Tools for Linux

The tools also can be used on the command line, instead of with the GUI. Once the Xilinx binaries are on your Linux $PATH, you can drive them with batch mode scripts, programs and makefiles. If you want to run these commands from the shell, you can crib from the command log, produced by the Project Navigator, and improvise from there. For example, these commands can be modified to add shell variables. For the design created in this article, the generated command log text looks like:

xst -intstyle ise -ifn __projnav/mpy16.xst \
-ofn mpy16.syr
ngdbuild -intstyle ise \
-dd /home/mab/VERILOG/MPY-TEST/_ngo -i  \
-p xc2vp7-fg456-6 mpy16.ngc mpy16.ngd
map -intstyle ise -p xc2vp7-fg456-6 -cm area \
-pr b -k 4 -c 100 -tx off \
-o mpy16_map.ncd mpy16.ngd mpy16.pcf
par -w -intstyle ise -ol std -t 1 mpy16_map.ncd \
mpy16.ncd mpy16.pcf
trce -intstyle ise -e 3 -l 3 -xml mpy16 mpy16.ncd \
-o mpy16.twr mpy16.pcf
bitgen -intstyle ise -f mpy16.ut mpy16.ncd

We have introduced FPGAs in the context of modern semiconductor technology, have described how software and hardware lines are blurring and have taken a quick tour of the ISE 6.1i FPGA implementation tools on Linux. You also can refer to the August 2002 issue of LJ (/article/6073), which first introduced the Xilinx ML300 development board and embedded Linux on the Virtex-II Pro FPGA.