Ferramentas para desenvolvimento de sistemas digitais reconfiguráveis

Abstract

The paper presents a tutorial, which covers new methods and tools that are used in educational process of Electronics and Telecommunications Department of Aveiro University for the disciplines devoted to the design of reconfigurable systems. Three following basic topics have been considered: 1) FPGAs of state-of-the-art Spartan-II/Spartan-IIE families that possess a number of advantages, such as low cost, well-defined architecture of primary components, etc.; 2) FPGA-based up to date prototyping boards, such as RC100 of Celoxica, TE-XC2Se of Trenz Electronic and XSA100 of XESS; 3) PC version of Xilinx ISE 5, which is modern CAD software integrating traditional tools for the design of FPGA-based digital systems. The paper describes a number of helpful examples that demonstrate capabilities of FPGAs and Xilinx ISE, such as the use of hardware description languages (VHDL in particular), system and user-defined libraries, implementation of schematic components, synthesis of finitestate machines, modelling, interacting with external hardware (such as liquid crystal display - LCD, static RAM, mouse, etc), dedicated (Block RAM) and distributed memory, sinchronization circuits based on delay-looked loops, core generators, EDIF-based design flow including implementation of circuits designed from system-level specification languages (Handel-C in particular), etc.