Setup Xilinx ISE 14.1 (Free Version) and Digilent’s Adept Utilities in Fedora 17 64-bit

Hello everybody! As promised in the previous post, I’m going to show you how to setup the tools you’ll need to work with Digilent’s FPGA boards. This tutorial is also helpful if you want to use Xilinx ISE in Fedora. It is possible to program a number of boards (including the Nexys3 which I have) directly from Xilinx.

There was no real problem for me for most of the installation phase. Things worked great till the cable drivers installation. No matter what I tried, it wouldn’t work. After searching a lot online, I saw that this is a problem on RedHat and Centos as well (please correct me if I am wrong). After more searching, I found out how I can get things to work. I’m actually redoing the entire installation so that I don’t miss any step. So lets get started! 🙂

New Equipment! An FPGA Board And Some Delicious Pi :-)

So I’ve finally got myself something I’ve been wanting for a long time – an FPGA board. FPGAs are extremely useful for building large digital systems. All you need to do is write code in either VHDL or Verilog and you’re done (well not quite. There are a few more steps but we’ll look at that later). Originally, I was planning to buy a DSP board from Texas Instruments. However, a friend at MITx (More on that in another blog post) told me about the boards made by Digilent (Thanks Hobie!). Till now, the boards I found were too costly for me. There were a few with Digilent that were perfect! I decided to go with the Nexys3.