Colin O'Flynn
Archive · old wiki · last edited July 2012

Programming Xilinx CPLD (XC9500XL, XC9536XL) with SVF Player over USB

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I recently needed to program a XC9536XL device over USB. I had found the opendous-jtag project and UrJTAG, which together form the solution I need. Note the hardware I am using is specifically implemented on my Bora board.

Using Batch mode for Impact

Impact has a batch mode you can use. To do so you call impact as such:

impact -batch commandlist.cmd

For the commandlist.cmd you require the following entries:

setMode -bscan
setCable -p svf -file outputfile.svf
addDevice -p 1 -file inputfile.jed
erase -p 1
program -p 1
quit

This file does the following (in order):

  1. Set cabletype to ‘SVF Writer’
  2. Add the .jed file (or .bit for FPGA)
  3. Erase the device. It is critical you call this or the programming will fail, probably with odd errors like ‘TDO Mismatch’.
  4. Program the device.
  5. Quit

For example on Windows, I made a bat file called ‘jed2svf.bat’. This file has the following contents:

del commandToImpact.cmd
del %1.svf

echo setMode -bscan >> commandToImpact.cmd
echo setCable -p svf -file %1.svf >> commandToImpact.cmd
echo addDevice -p 1 -file %1.jed >> commandToImpact.cmd
echo erase -p 1 >> commandToImpact.cmd
echo program -p 1 >> commandToImpact.cmd
echo quit >> commandToImpact.cmd

impact -batch commandToImpact.cmd

Then you can just call it like this:

jed2svf.bat io_connections

Which converts io_connections.jed to io_connections.svf.

Playing with UrJTAG

I use UrJTAG to program the file. The commands to run are (you can put these in a file and call jtag with that file as an argument):

cable opendous 
detect
svf outputfile.svf
quit

Again I made a batch file which calls the whole thing. Note it assumes you have urjtag in a directory called ‘urjtag-windows-dist’ as you can see, since it CDs to that.

del urjtagcmd.txt
echo cable opendous >> urjtagcmd.txt
echo detect >> urjtagcmd.txt
echo svf ../%1.svf progress >> urjtagcmd.txt
echo quit >> urjtagcmd.txt
cd urjtag-windows-dist
jtag.exe ../urjtagcmd.txt
cd ..

Putting it all together:

I make a final batch file which calls all of the above. It looks like this:

call C:\Xilinx\13.2\ISE_DS\settings32.bat
call jed2svf.bat io_connections
call urjtag_svf.bat io_connections
pause

You need to edit the path to your Xilinx tools depending on your install location & version. It again assumes you have a directory called urjtag-windows-dist which has the urjtag binary along with required DLLs in it.