Pushing FPGA config files via serial using ‘cat’
posted Nov 19th 2011 3:26pm by Mike Szczysfiled under: Microcontrollers
[Andrew] is trying to buckle down and hammer out his PhD project but was surprised by the sorry state of the configuration options for his FPGA/ARM dev board. Using JTAG was painfully slow, so he studied the datasheet to see if there was another way. It turns out the Xilinx FPGA he’s using does have a slave serial mode so he came up with a way to push configuration from the ARM to the FPGA serially.
Four of the connects he needed were already mapped to PortC pins on the AT91SAM9260 ARM System on a Chip. He ended up using the EN_GSM pin on the FPGA, since there is no GSM module on this board; connecting it to the microcontroller with a piece of wire. Now he can SSH into the ARM processor, grabbing information on the FPGA from /dev/fpga0. When it comes time to program, it’s as easy as using the cat command on the binary file and redirecting the output to the same hook.
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