Spartan 3 Starter Board Tutorial (Simple decoder Design synthesized and loaded to board) Jim Duckworth, January 2005, WPI. (updated September 2006 by Kahraman Akdemir for version 8.1ISE) Start XilinxProject Navigator:
SelectFile => New Project Select a project location and project name, for example:
ClickFinish Project Navigator now shows your project including a top level VHDL file for the decoder. You can close the Design Summary window shown below, and you will have the decoder.vhd file instead.
We now need to describe the behavior of the decoder using statements in the architecture body. In this example we will use a conditional signal assignment statement:
Before we can synthesize this design we need to specify what pins on the FPGA the inputs and outputs are connected to. There are a number of ways to do this. 1)Click on theAssign Package Pinsprocess in the left middle window, under User Constraints. Note: You will be asked to save the file and your design will be checked for syntax errors (these will need to be fixed before you can proceed). The tools will prompt you to create a UCF file:
ClickYes The following window opens, Under IO pins section, enter the I/O Locations.
Once you have saved the UCF file, go back and select the decoder source in the top left pane. Before we can load the design into the board we need to configure the JTAG connection. Rightclick on theGenerate Programming Fileprocess in the process window. Select theStartup Optionstab and change theFPGA StartUp Clockto JTAG clock as shown:
ClickOK. Select theConfigure Device (iMPACT)under theGenerate Programming Fileprocess in the process window. Make sure your board is powered up and the JTAG cable is connected.