Xilinx Tools

Frame Generation Tool

General

This tool can be used to generate frames for any Xilinx Virtex-II Pro FPGA. Therefore an XML based configuration file exists. To generate frame files the type of FPGA has to be added to the XML file. This is done in the following way: <Device DeviceName="XC2VP7" DeviceID="0124A093" numFrames="1320" frameLength="106" IOBColumns="2" IOBFrames="4" IOIColumns="2" IOIFrames="22" CLBColumns="34" CLBFrames="22" BRAMColumns="6" BRAMFrames="64" BRAMICColumns="6" BRAMICFrames="22" GCLKColumns="1" GCLKFrames="4">

The device name can be found directly on the chip. The other values are provided in the Xilinx User Guide in the chapter “Configuration – Configuration Details”. There you will find two tables in which all frame and column sizes are listed. The device IDs you will also find in a table in this chapter. For different types of Virtex FPGAs the names of the frame types can vary. The names shown above are an example for Virtex-II Pro frames.

Creating frames

Generating the frames is done in these steps: 1. Load the bit-file for the FPGA 2. Type the name of the device as you can see above in “DeviceName” 3. Load the XML configuration file 4. Type the directory where the frames are saved to 5. Press the “Split” button If the frames were generated successfully or an error occurred you will see a message.

Creating binary command blocks

This part can be found on the second tab on the right side. To create these command blocks just follow the steps 1-3 above. After you have done this enter the name (and path) of the command file and press the “Generate ...” button right beside. If the block was generated successfully or an error occurred you will see a message.

Uploading to a dedicated location

To load the files that were generated to the place they are needed an uploading feature was introduced. Here you enter the hostname to where you want to load the files up. Authenticating at the host is done by entering username and password. After that you are able to specify a local file/folder that has to be loaded up and a remote directory where the files/folder is saved to.

NOTE

The remote directory must exist and local directories that contain subdirectories can not be loaded up
E.g. you want to load the files to “/tmp/test” the “test” directory has to be created before uploading.