From the course: Learning Verilog for FPGA Development

Setting up your environment - FPGA Tutorial

From the course: Learning Verilog for FPGA Development

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Setting up your environment

- Throughout the course, you'll see the code written and tested in the Vivado Design Suite by Xilinx. So it's a good idea to make sure you have your environment properly set up for creating your own projects and run your simulations. The first thing you need to do is download and install the Vivado Design Suite. You can find it at Xilinx's website. You don't have to purchase a license because Xilinx offers the Vivado WebPACK Edition, which is intended for hobbyists and education. This is the license you're expected to use when you purchase a Basys 3 board. At the time of this recording, the latest version of Vivado is 2019.2. Now, in the download space, make sure to read the messages for the latest updates as these are usually add-ons to the base installer to support more advanced FBGA families and not required for entry-level applications like the ones in this course. And notice that the software is available for Windows and Linux. When you run the installer, you may asked which FBGA's you want to support. Just make sure to include the Artix-7 family. And, finally, I want to show you how all the projects available in the exercise files were created so that you may create your own projects when you have to. But remember, the provided projects are already set up for you. So here's the Vivado welcome screen where you can click on the Create Project link. This starts a nice wizard where the first step is to enter your project name and location. Vivado has been known to be picky on the file names, so I recommend that you keep the path short. For example, here I'm using C slash Verilog. Then you get to choose which type of project you want. RTL is the only type of project we'll use. And make sure to check on this box to specify your source files later. Now this step is tricky. Vivado supports a wide variety of FBGA chips and each has a specific code. So you need to apply filters to find the one you want. We'll use the FBGA on the basys three board by digilent. That's an Artix-7 FBGA with a long name. Let me find it for you. So the target FBGA in all of our exercise files is the middle on, it's code is XC7A35TCPG236-1. This code specifies the FBGA family, the integrated circuit package, it's size, and it's speed. After that you're good to go with your new designs. Once again remember that the provided exercise files are ready to go and you only have to go through this procedure if you want to create a project from scratch.

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