Using Altium Designer with a custom or 3rd-party FPGA dev board

A lot of Altium Designer users develop their FPGA designs with vendor tools and are never quite sure how to use Altium Designer with their own board. This video shows step-by-step how to do it.

The other camp is, those users who have an Altium Nanoboard but then wish to port their design to a custom board.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Altium
• FPGA
• CPLD
• mentor
• xilinx
• altera
• lattice
• actel
• quick logic
• quicklogic
• vantice
• mach
• spartan
• electronics
• pcb
• pwb
• orcad
• cadence
• allegro
• expedition
• PADS
• logic
• synthesis
• programmable
• VHDL

[schematica]

In theory, you can. But I'm not sure the NExys2 gives you access to the JTAG ports directly (I'm pretty sure that one uses a kind of built-in USB downloader that only works with the Xilinx software).

If you can get the JTAG pins onto the flying leads of the Altium Designer download adapter as shown in this video, you can use the board.

[monstercameron]

is that the schematic language?

[schematica]

@monstercameron The design is done using Altium Designer - the hardware programmed into the FPGA in this case was using a Schematic/OpenBus design and some C-code was run on the TSK3000 CPU IP Core, does that answer?

[fondo121]

Yes, my nexys2 board uses a built-in USB downloader that only works with the Xilinx software, in fact we have to use de adept.digilent software for programming the board

So, what can I do? plssss helpppp

I really preciate your help, final proyect at schooll is driving me crazy:S

[fondo121]

Hi I have the Nexys2 from Digilent, It comes with the Spartan3e FPGA and it has a JTAG port, do you know if this is going to work with Altium Designer?