Hi guys,

My earlier post (Getting started with Verilog) gave you some information about how to start learning Verilog HDL. Now reading tutorials and books alone doesn’t help you much. You really need to do some practicals. So in this post I’m gonna help you with “how to start to write verilog programs using ISE Design Suit? and how to install a Verilog program in a FPGA?”. Before  starting, let me get this straight. Here the software that you need to use is ISE Design Suit, which is a product of Xilinx Inc and this software can only be used if you are using a FPGA which is developed by Xilinx. Ex: – Spartan boards, Virtex boards, etc. Please download ISE and get the web pack license, its free and enough for most of the projects that we can do with FPGAs. If you have a FPGA board developed by Altera, then you have to use their software named “Quartus”.

So you can learn this using 2 methods.

1. Reading tutorials about ISE and reading the Manual for your FPGA board.

But you will surely get annoyed by looking at the length of these tutorials and manuals :(

That’s why second method is there for. BTW having these manuals with you is important and you can refer them anytime when you are up to little advance stuff.

So for ISE, please the download ISE 13.x light tutorials and in depth tutorial from here.

All the Xilinx FPGA board manuals can be found from here.

2. Watching YouTube Videos :)

haha, now this is interesting. I came across the following video play list created by Geoff Sevart about using ISE Webpack to program FPGAs. It explains everything about this topic perfectly. He uses ISE Webpack 12.1 and a Spartan 3E board for this demonstration, but the process is more or less same for all the FPGAs developed by Xilinx. One thing you have to remember is that ISE Design Suit’s tool named “Project Navigator” is the tool to develop Verilog codes and tool named “iMpact” is used to program the FPGA. The USB-based JTAG programming interface  is used to connect the FPGA board with your computer.

(please visit YouTube to see other parts.)

Problems you may face…

  • Xilinx ISE Design Suit’s latest versions may not support dated FPGA boards, if that is the case, you have to download an old version of ISE. Please refer the ISE’s versions and its supported boards from here.
  • How to install programming file permanently if you have multiple PROMs in your FPGA board? In part5 (last part) of the play list (when creating PROM files to store the program permanently in the board) at time 4.23, it provides instructions to select the option of “Auto Select PROM”. But for most FPGA boards (specially if you have multiple PROMs), this auto selecting feature will not work. So then you have to refer to your FPGA board’s user manual. It should have a chapter named like “FPGA Configuration Options”.

Well, those are the issues that I came across for now. If there are any other problems, please comment as a question.

Thanks for reading. Cheers…