Using UrJTAG to program Actel FPGA's

Written by Antti Lukats November 13, 2009 Hits: 1478 Favorites

4.0 (1)

It's actually possible, working and tested.

Open source JTAG tools from http://urjtag.org
Installation takes 2 minutes, not a single question too much asked.

UrJTAG is mostly tested with Altera and Xilinx FPGA's but I was interested to checkout if it can be used to program Actel FPGA's as well.

I am using U2TOOL USB Cable in "USB Blaster" compatibility mode so here is how to program with urjtag

cable UsbBlaster
detect
part 0
svf top_PROGRAM.svf

There is one trick.. you need to import Actel BSDL files first, or nothing will work. This can be done like this

bsdl path c:\bsdl
bsdl dump

you should place one bsdl file to C:\bsdl
the output is sent to console out so I had to use > redirect to get into real file

But after that, Actel flashing works. Painfully slow. 5 Minutes for A3P060.

Well this solution is free and does not special hardware, many available JTAG cables can be used.

UrJTAG developers report A3P250 programming time to be "a few minutes" using FT2232 based JTAG cables. This is nice speed already.

cable UsbBlaster

detect

part 0

svf top_PROGRAM.svf

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Overall:

4.0

UrJTAG for Xilinx USB Platform Cable II too?

Overall:

4.0

Reviewed by Jaime Aranguren
November 29, 2009

Comments (1)
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Hi Antti,

This is certainly an interesting tip; have been using UrJTAG to program some small Altera CPLDs with Xilinx Parallel Cable III, but as usual, timing is the problem... too slow. Now that I would like to test on some bigger ICs (Lattice's XP2-5 FPGA) I would like to know if Xilinx USB Platform Cable II would work as well; under that name is does not appear among the supported cables.

Do you know/guess it would work?

Written by :

Antti Lukats