Xilinx tools setup

In this page you will find instructions on how to setup the Xilinx tools. If you have Xilinx Platform Studio working and Impact successfully recognising the FPGA board then there is no need to go through these instructions. The page includes some of the tweaking that I had to do to get these tools working.

#Setup for Xilinx Platform Studio

Once you have installed the ISE Design Suite you have to alter the bashrc file located at ~/.bashrc. Open the file in vim or any text editor and add the following lines at the end that is required for XPS (Xilinx Platform Studio) to work.

#The following two variables can be configured to point to a server containing the license for XPS to work
#export LM_LICENSE_FILE=
#export XILINXD_LICENSE_FILE=

export XILINX=/opt/Xilinx/14.1/ISE_DS/ISE/

export XILINX_DSP=$XILINX

PATH=/opt/Xilinx/14.1/ISE_DS/ISE/bin/lin:/opt/Xilinx/14.1/ISE_DS/ISE/sysgen/util:${PATH}

source /opt/Xilinx/14.1/ISE_DS/settings32.sh --quiet

export XPS=/opt/Xilinx/14.1/ISE_DS/EDK/bin/lin

function xps(){
	exec `echo $XPS`/xps &
}

Once you have added these to your bashrc file, quit the terminal and start it again. In order to start XPS, you just have to type into the terminal:

xps

#Impact settings

Impact is a tool used to program your FPGA development board. In order to setup Impact, I had to download a third-party usb driver. For some reason the usb drivers provided by Xilinx were not compatible with their own boards! Then again who supports Ubuntu!

The driver that I had to use can be found in the following link:

http://git.zerfleddert.de/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi/usb-driver

The setup instructions should be given in the README file provided but nevertheless, I will log what I had to do to setup the drivers. Look into the USB Driver README file for more information.

I extracted the files in my home directory and went into the directory containing the 'setup_pcusb' file. I executed the following command:

./setup_pcusb

The $XILINX environment variable was already setup correctly in my bashrc file.

My USB Driver was stored in the directory:

/home/whoami/USBDriver/usb-driver-HEAD-2d19c7c

I changed my bashrc file in the following way to use Impact:

export LD_PRELOAD=/home/`whoami`/USBDriver/usb-driver-HEAD-2d19c7c/libusb-driver.so

function imp(){
	LD_PRELOAD=/home/`whoami`/USBDriver/usb-driver-HEAD-2d19c7c/libusb-driver.so impact &
}

In order to run impact I just had to execute the following command:

imp