Introduction

Many of the circuits used in the Fairisle project incorporate Xilinx chips. The configuration data for these chips is generally held on a small 8-pin serial PROM, which initialises the Xilinx on power-up. During testing, however, the Xilinx configuration may need to be changed several times, requiring many PROMs to be blown and then discarded.

The RAMPROM system allows a Xilinx Teaching Board (XTB), by means of a special cable, to be plugged into the socket normally occupied by a Xilinx serial prom. An emulator configuration is loaded into the XTB. The RAM on the XTB can then be loaded with the data that would normally be blown into the serial prom.

Here are some details of important files:

rammer.hdl The HDL for the emulator itself.

rammerout.xil The resulting configuration file for the teaching board.

xidump A program for sending data to the teaching board. It opens a connection to the specified host and service, and sends the XTB commands given on stdin to the teaching board. The returning codes are checked and then sent to stdout. Xidump is written in perl.

ramprom The script which does the setting up and loading of the prom emulator. See below.

promMakefile A makefile used by RAMPROM .