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• Xilinx Ise 14.7 Tutorial

Hello,

In this guide, I will show you how to install XILINX ISE 14.7 on Windows 10.

The latest version of the Xilinx development tools don't support the Spartan 6 and earlier FPGAs so you need to use the prior version those tools - ISE 14.7 and that only works on Linux and older versions of Windows. Xilinx do have what they call their Windows 10 version of ISE, but it's just a virtual Linux machine with ISE pre-installed on it. Jun 16, 2015 1 Solution. You can purchase Vivado Design Edition/ System Edition license from distributors or from Xilinx online store. With this purchase you will get two licenses one to use with Vivado and the other to use ISE.

Step1: Go to the XILINX official website and click on the XILINX ISE WebPACK design software link.

Step 2: Click on the Download and select the 14.7 Windows 10 edition.

Step 3: Sign in with your Email id and password and fill up the agreement to begin downloading.

Step 4: After the download is started, we need to download a virtual box called Oracle VM Virtualbox (the driver which helps in detecting the FPGA works best on Linux or Windows 7 so we use a Virtual box). Download the latest version of the tool depending upon your OS.

Step 5: Launch the VirtualBox installer and click next.

Step 6: Select the installation directory and click next.

Step 7: click next on the next window and after that window, there will be a warning on network interfaces so click yes.

Step 8: On the next window click install and installation will begin. after the Virtualbox is installed don’t change any settings and begin the installation of XILINX ISE 14.7.

Step 9: the WinRAR tool can be used to extract the ISE setup then and double-click the xsetup.exe file.

Step 10: Allow access to Java(TM) Platform SE binary then a window will appear for ISE 14.7 Virtual machine installer. Click next on that window. Then a pop will appear saying “Oracle VirtualBox Installation Detected” (you can refer to the manual on Xilinx to check the supported versions of VirtualBox but the latest versions work fine as well). Click continue on that pop-up.

Step 11: On the next window accept the license agreements and click next till you reach the “select destination directory” window. In this window select your preferred drive for installation and select a directory to share with VM. (This directory will appear in your virtual machine for sharing the files between VM and Host PC). Select the path and folder based on your storage available, Then click next.

Note:- If you get a warning like shown in the image above then uncheck the create program group entries.

Step 12: On the next window click install.

Step 13: Installation will take some time. After the installation is finished you will see “ISE_14.7__Virtual_Machine” added to your Oracle VirtualBox.

Step 14: Double click on ISE Virtual machine, You will see the Linux OS is loading and the home screen will open. (Ignore the auto-capture keyboard and mouse pointer integration).

Step 15: Double click the project navigator, the ISE 14.7 tool will start.

Step 16: Create a new project and you are good to go to start writing and synthesizing the modules. (For licensing guide click here to get a free license and how to load the license inside the tool).

Happy coding;

Table of Contents

• Why ISE and not a newer toolset?
• The Development Tools
• Which Tool For The Job?
  • Xilinx ISE
• Accessing the ISE 14.7 Feb 2020 Release Installation Medium on Linux/MacOSX System
  • Accessing The Xilinx ISE Files Without Virtual Machine
    • Convert VMDK File Into Raw Image File

This article goes into the Xilinx ISE development and build environment for Xilinx’s Spartan6 and Spartan3 line of chips. I write a bit about why one would use the older ISE toolset and cover how one can get access to the toolset from the Xilinx installation materials.

Note, you will need a license from Xilinx to use the tools in question. Xilinx offers free licenses for their legacy tools.

Legacy chips and older chips. It’s all about the legacy and older chips.

Looking at the current status of chips at the time of the writing of this article:

Legacy & EOL’d

• Spartan3 (EOL’d)
  • EOL’d, however, still a LARGE amount of the chips out in the market and in various installed devices…

Cost Optimized

• Spartan6
  • Considered Legacy for many situations as the Spartan7’s platform takes over. Still, a good deal of supply and inventory out there.
• Spartan7
  • Baseline core for the new generation of FPGA from Xilinx.
• Artix-7
• Zynq-7000 series

Series 7 Generation

• Spartan 7
• Artix(spartan7 based)
• Virtex(spartan7 based)
• Kintex(spartan7 based)

UltraScale

• Virtex(spartan7 based)
• Kintex(spartan7 based)
• Artix(ultrascale)
• Kintex(ultrascale)

UltraScale+

• Artix(ultrascale+)
• Kintex(ultrascale+)
• Virtex(ultrascale+)

And as with the chips that Xilinx supports, so goes their development environments. Newer software solutions Xilinx offers will generally not support EOL’d or other older products.

Current Xilinx Development Environments

• Vitas AI
• Vitas Unified
• Vivado
• Vivado ML (machine learning geared Vivado)

Legacy Xilinx Development Environments

• ISE

Vivado and Vitis

From Xilinx’s Support Response: https://www.xilinx.com/support/answers/53109.html:

• “The Vivado tool has been created for the 7 Series devices (Virtex-7, Kintex-7, Artix-7, and Zynq-7000).”
• “To support the Spartan-6 devices (or any non 7 Series devices), you will need to use the latest ISE design tools, which work best regardless of the complexity of the design.”

So, for anything Series 7, like the Virtex, Kintex, Artix, and ZYNQ, Vivado is the way to go.

Vitis further requires that the chip in question be a SoC with an onboard ARM processor and not just an FPGA.

Xilinx ISE

To support hardware from the Spartan-6 family, you will need to use Xilinx ISE 14.7’s Feb 2020 release. This version runs under Windows 10, however, is actually a virtual machine running the Linux version of ISE 14.7 with an expanded set of Spartan-6 chip support.

There is another version of ISE 14.7, released Oct 2013, which supports Spartan3 devices, though does not support all sizes of Spartan6 devices.

You can install one version or both versions, if you have need to support Spartan3 and Spartan6 devices.

All Spartan6 Devices

• ISE 14.7 Feb 2020 Release
• 16GB ZIP file with 16GB OVA(posix tar) file with embedded 16GB VMDK(vmware disk image). So you will need at least 36-40GB of working space at any given time to access the files of interest. If you are just going to run the virtual machine like that. If you intend to install on your own custom Linux installation(docker,etc), you will need to add an additional 64GB on top to factor in for the raw disk image. Having at least 128GB available to allow for conversion is definitely recommended.

All Spartan3 and some Spartan6 Devices

• ISE 14.7 Oct 2013 Release
• 7GB download image
• Contains both the Windows and Linux installation materials.

• Download the zip file from Xilinx’s download page
• unzip the Xilinx_ISE_14.7_Win10_14.7_VM_0213_1.zip file.
• You will be presented with a bunch of Windows support/installation files. Ignore these as you are only interested in the file: ova/14.7_VM.ova file.
• Linux portions of commands are run inside of a Docker instance running Ubuntu 20.10

Accessing The Xilinx ISE Files Using Virtual Machine

The zip file downloaded from Xilinx will yield an ova file when unzipped.

Just unzip the zip file and import the ova file and import. This ova file can be imported by VMware’s Fusion/Workstation/Player and Oracle’s VirtualBox.

When the virtual machine finishes booting up, you can access the Xilinx ISE installation from the /opt/Xilinx folder. The usual rsync works great for this. The footprint is around 20GB.

Accessing The Xilinx ISE Files Without Virtual Machine

But let’s say you want to fire up ISE in a Docker environment or you just want access without loading any virtualization software. To do this, you will need to unwrap the downloaded file like an onion.

Extract the VMDK file

The 14.7_VM-disk001.vmdk is a VMware virtual disk. However, you should be able to access the contents

Convert VMDK File Into Raw Image File

In order to access the contents of the VMDK file without using a virtual machine, you will need a few tools:

• Qemu (Mac OS X & Linux)
• MacFuse (Mac OS X only)
• Ext4Fuse (Mac OS X only)

Linux View And Mount

On Linux, you can use the partx and/or fdisk tools to examine the raw image file. You will see that it contains two partitions. The 58GB partition is the root filesystem. The 6GB partition is the swap partition. You _CAN_ skip this step, however, it is always good to verify that nothing has changed.

Mounting will be accomplished via loopback mounting:

• Note that the first partition starts at block 2048. The block size is 512 bytes. So the offset in bytes for the first partition is 1048576. If the start block differs for you, re-calculate accordingly.

This should now give you access to the filesystem. Skip to the next section.

Solved: Where To Purchase Xilinx ISE 14.7? - Community Forums

Mac OS X View and Mount

Unfortunately, Mac OS X cannot mount the raw file directly. You will need to install MacFUSE as well as EXT4FUSE:

You will need to reboot after installing MacFUSE. When installing ext4fuse, you might get a “ext4fuse disabled because of closed source MacFUSE”, etc. There is a good description on how to work around this issue:

Once you have rebooted and allowed the extension to load in Preferences, you will now be able to mount the raw file.

You should now have access to the contents of the filesystem:

Copying Data To Your Target System

Now that you have access to the filesystem, you can copy the Xilinx ISE to your folder/system of choice. I will be installing mine into my Docker environment. You might be copying into your Docker/VM/BareMetal/etc. I’m using rsync:

Note, since the ext4fuse mount was performed under sudo, only root will be able to see the filesystem. Depending on your setup, this copy will take a while. It’s 20GB of data.

Note, I am copying the /opt/Xilinx folder into my own /opt/Xilinx folder. There are symlinks in the Xilinx folders that expects Xilinx to be installed where it is. This is consistent between different versions of the ISE.

Note, because the Feb 2020 and Oct 2013 ISE are both version 14.7, if you want to have both versions installed in the same environment, you will need to rename the folders to something else.

Cleaning Up Mounted Filesystem

When you are done copying, you can unmount the mounted image:

Next Up

This article is the start of my documentation for getting Xilinx’s legacy ISE 14.7 environment setup for Spartan6 development. In the next article, I go over the Docker container configuration for Xilinx ISE 14.7

Xilinx Ise 14.7 Tutorial