Support for Custom FPGA Board Design

[core2explore]

Currently we are using Nexys Video Development Board which is having many features and peripherals. Now we want to make our custom board with limited peripherals.

We would like to use only 2 Configuration modes - JTAG  Progamming and Quad-SPI Flash Memory Mode. We are not looking for SD Card and USB Programming mode. In Reference Manual Configuration Diagram, There is one PIC14 Controller available, We have confusion about is requirement? Is it necessary to have if we are not using SD Card and USB Progamming mode?

It will be great help if you can direct us in this regard. We are not able to find technical support email address hence we are writing on this email address.

[D@n]

@hello.parth,

You are quickly going to run into the problem that Digilent holds its configuration logic to be proprietary.  It's not shown on the board schematic.  (I haven't asked them, though, if they'd ever sell this information ...)

Regarding reading the configuration from flash, that part of the design can usually be found on their boards.  Each Xilinx FPGA has a specific set of pins for the configuration flash.  Use those pins, and set the appropriate mode pins for loading from flash, and you should be good.

Loading from JTAG is a bit more difficult.  While you don't need to adjust the mode pins to switch from SPI loading to JTAG loading, you'll still need to figure out how to hook up the FTDI chip and that's the part of the Schematic that's missing on the Digilent boards.  Let me suggest that you instead copy the JTAG+UART portion of the design from the Max-1000 circuit board from Trenz.  If you dig a little deeper, you'll quickly discover that FTDI is so committed to supporting FPGA designs that they also have demonstration designs showing how to use JTAG when using their chips.  If worse comes to worse, you can at least load a design via an FTDI chip using the open source libxsvf driver.

Dan

[jpeyron]

Hi @hello.parth,

I have PM'd you about the proprietary FTDI programming circuit.

thank you,

Jon

[core2explore]

Thank you @jpeyron for support.

We would like design custom board similar configuration modes to Arty A7-35 which has only JTAG-USB and SPI Flash Memory.

 

[zygot]

18 hours ago, jpeyron said:

I have PM'd you about the proprietary FTDI programming circuit.

If you are going to provide this information to anyone who asks why not just provide complete schematics like you used to do?

[JColvin]

Hi @zygot (and anybody else who is wondering),

We didn't provide the circuitry details; we instead provided them the name of the appropriate Digilent contact to discuss licensing options of this circuitry. We'll try to be more transparent about this sort of thing in the future.

Thank you,
JColvin