xilinx-provision

Automates the tasks involved in uploading a bitfile to a Xilinx FPGA board.

Disclaimer

The authors are not affiliated in any way with Xilinx, Inc. We are sharing this code so that other researches won’t have to duplicate the effort.

Features

The gem automates the following tasks:

builds a recent version of the USB cable driver
writes udev rules for the USB cable driver
writes udev rules for uploading firmware to the cable
uploads a bitfile to a FPGA

Usage

After installing the ruby gem, perform a one-time setup to get the USB cable set up.

sudo xilinx-provision-setup

Then upload a bitfile to your FPGA using

xilinx-provision path/to/bitfile

Notice that the setup command requires root access, but normal operation does not.

To program FPGAs automatically, use the following Ruby code.

require 'xilinx/provision'
Xilinx::Provision.fpga 'path/to/bitfile'

For advanced usage, see the examples in the bin/ and spec/ directories.

Dependencies

Right now, the gem works in Debian-based Linux distributions. It should be easy to extend it to other Linux distributions.

I have no interest in making the gem work on Windows, but I would welcome patches that do so.

The gem assumes Xilinx ISE is installed. Any edition will work, including the WebPACK free edition. Download the software from: www.xilinx.com/support/download/index.htm

Contributing to xilinx-provision