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Question & Answer
Classification:
Date: Feb 22, 2001
Some test applications for the XSV Board
Q:
I am currently teaching our senior-level design course in which the students implement a processor using an XSV prototype board with a Virtex 800 series FPGA on it. As you know, this board has various I/O ports on it, and many of the students would like to be able to use these I/O ports to interface with external devices. However, the adapter chips on the board are very bare, leaving most of the low-level implementation of these I/O protocols to hardware on the FPGA.
I am writing to ask you for assistance in locating reference designs in the form of HDL code or netlists, either from you or other users of the board, that we could use as cores to interface with external devices such as USB peripherals or an ethernet LAN. As a university, our options for buying or licensing such cores are limited, so we are primarily interested in reference designs that are freely available or could be donated for our use.
Are you aware of any partners or industry organizations that would be willing to help us on this topic? Are you aware of any precedents in terms of donations to other universities? Any leads you could provide would be appreciated.
A:
For a complete set of applications for the various interfaces on the XSV Board, look at the set of VHDL projects done by the University of Queensland.
For a free ethernet interface, you can look at http://ilima.eng.hawaii.edu/XCoNET/XCoNET.htm.
For a free USB core, please check http://www.trenz-electronic.de.
You can look at the stereo codec design example in the XST-1 manual. This design will work on the XSV Board since it uses the same codec circuitry as the XST-1. You will have to change the pin assignments.
There is also a simple frame-grabber design that we use to test the SAA7113 and RAMDAC on the XSV Board. The makefile will compile the design. The saasetup.bat command file calls the saa7113.exe executable which lets the PC initialize the SAA7113 through the parallel port, or you can uncomment the saa7113init module in the saa7113.vhd file and use hardware initialization.
There are also a couple of application notes on the XSV parallel port interface and the XSV Flash programming interface.