<title>XVPI: a portable hardware/software interface for Virtex</title>

Abstract

XVPI, the Xilinx Virtex Portable Interface, is a hardware / software interface and specification to assist in the design and implementation of Xilinx Virtex (tm) based systems. XVPI specifies a software accessible register to be defined in the hardware. This register contains all of the control and data signals necessary to drive the Virtex device. The software supplied with XVPI uses this register to read and write control and data signals to perform various device level functions. These functions combine to produce an Application Program Interface (API) which provides access to the Virtex device from software. The XVPI API supports all of the device level operations including partial configuration download, partial configuration readback, clock control and reset. Once the system is operational, designers may replace the software routines in the XVPI API with hardware assisted routines. This increases the system performance incrementally, without affecting the functionality. Though specified for the Virtex based system, this technique to perform the device level functions from software can be applied to any FPGA device. Additionally, XVPI is also supplied with an interface supporting Xilinx's JBits toolkit. Once XVPI is implemented, JBits and its associated applications, including the BoardScope debug tool, are fully operational on that Virtex based system.© (2000) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.