How to re-flash the Arty board?

Vivado

The Xilinx recommended way to re-flash the Arty board is to use the Vivado Design Studio, a huge, Windows-only commercial application.

For those in the synthesised hardware business, this might be a perfectly acceptable solution.

For the rest of us, installing a Windows virtual machine and huge (tens of GB) applications only to re-flash a development board is a bit too much.

xc3sprog

A simpler solution is to use the open source xc3sprog program.

How to build

GNU/Linux

On GNU/Linux, building xc3sprog requires svn, cmake, libftdi and libusb.

$ svn http://xc3sprog.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/xc3sprog/trunk xc3sprog.svn
$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ cmake ../xc3sprog.svn
$ make
$ make install

macOS

On macOS, the following Homebrew packages are required to build xc3sprog:

• cmake
• libftdi
• libusb
• pkg-config

You can then build using the steps described for GNU/Linux.

How to use

The Arty board has a FTDI interface to program the Xlinx FPGA, but the SPI flash is not directly accessible by FTDI, so it requires a special image inside Xlinx to make the connections to the SPI flash.

Given this configuration, the Arty re-flashing is done in two steps:

• the first step uses xc3sprog to program Xlinx to obtain access to the SPI flash
• the second step uses openocd to program the main .mcs image into the SPI flash

$ xc3sprog -c nexys4 E31_ArtyTop.bit
$ cd freedom-e-sdk
$ openocd -f bsp/env/coreplexip-e31-arty/openocd.cfg \
    -c "flash protect 0 0 last off" \
    -c "program coreplexip_e31_arty/arty.E31FPGAEvaluationConfig.mcs verify 0x40000000" \
    -c "exit"

TODO: explain where to get the E31_ArtyTop.bit file from.

Last modified on Wed Mar 27 19:53:11 2019 UTC.

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