[Fpga-synth] More on 9.2i

[Eric Brombaugh]

Scott Gravenhorst wrote:
> 9.2i, running under XP, crashes mightily with my project.   A popup tells
> me to create a webcase and include the project.
> 
> So I tried to open a webcase with Xilinx.  I had already received
> permission, but when I access the site with their "begin here" link, it
> crashes with an internal error.

My, you're certainly having some difficulty with their tools. I've 
noticed in the past that the Xilinx website is a bit fragile. I 
especially like it when it bombs out to a page that says something to 
the effect of "Errors in our website have been resolved. Please restart 
your browser". What!!??

As to the problems with your project: Have you tried your own advice 
(last line of your signature)? Lately I've been using the command line 
interface to the Xilinx XST, and NGD/MAP/PAR tools and that has been 
working well. Granted, I'm running it in Linux, but I don't believe that 
there's any reason it wouldn't work from a command tool shell under Win*.

The reason I ask is that I've found the Project Navigator IDE to be 
pretty shaky sometimes, and since I just want to synthesize and 
place/route I don't need all the other goodies that PN provides. PN also 
is a memory pig, so when PAR wants to use 3GB of my memory, it's nice 
not to have PN taking up another 500MB (which it does after a while - 
massive memory leaks).

Although I use make to manage the build process these days, I used to 
build up a simple shell script to run the process. It only needs to 
invoke three tools:

* xst (synthesis) - needs a script file to define settings and a project 
file to define the source files. To start you can just copy the 
*_xst.scr and *.prj files that PN made for you current project.
* xflow (manages NGDbuild/Map/PAR) - needs the ngc output from xst.
* bitgen (builds bitstream) - needs ncd output from PAR

Try it!


Eric