The good thing about these devices is that they can be reprogrammed (like microcontrollers) and do easily functions that are better implemented in hardware. These are devices that are programmed in hardware description languages (like VHDL, Verilog, System C) and their primitive functionality is down to flip-flop and gates, something which is a low level comparing to microcontrollers. Another class of devices that have similarities with microcontrollers is the programmable logic devices called CPLD (Complex Programmable Logic Device) or FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Arrays). Nowadays microcontrollers have bigger memory capacities and a bunch of peripherals that can do almost everything. Microcontrollers are very popular because they can easily control systems and they are flexible. I will provide any necessary tools (and their code). I will present the process of how to generate the C file with the bitstream information for configuring the Xilinx Spartan FPGAs, although you can apply this technique to virtually any serially configured device. In a following article, I will present how to download and use this code from AVRILOS. I will also present a makefile for compiling the Xilinx FPGA code. This will reduce chip count if you integrate FPGAs with a microcontroller as I often do.

In this article, I will describe the process and tools to generate FPGA configuration data for integration into your code and be able to configure FPGA devices without the need of an external serial or PROM/Flash. In a previous article, I presented the AVRILOS round-robin operating system. Download fpga_v3 - 108.41 KB, FPGA Files.

Download fpgatools - 54.21 KB, FPGA Tools and Test Files.

Xilinx impact software download