69
(a) Xilinx Virtex-5 LX330 FPGA (b) Digilent USB-JTAG programming cable
Figure B.3 : (a) The LX330 FPGA is one of the largest FPGA in the Virtex-5 family.
It contains 1200 user-configurable I/O’s, thus sufficient to control 1024 SLM pixels
simultaneously, (b) The USB-JTAG programming cable connects the USB port of
a computer to the JTAG port on the FPGA prototyping platform. The Xilinx ISE
software programs the FPGA through this cable.
stretched too much. Another more robust but expensive version of the same cable
(part number: HW-USB-II-G) is available on the Xilinx webpage.
B.2 FPGA Verilog programming
One can program the FPGA either in Verilog or VHDL language. The SLM control
system has Verilog programs written for raster scanning, i.e., switching on each SLM
pixel in a particular order, or for reading in and displaying SLM patterns from text
files one by one, or other test programs for the SLM characterization experiments.
The computer uses the Xilinx ISE software (Version 11.1) as the Verilog programming
interface and for compilation of Verilog programs into bitstreams to be downloaded
onto the FPGA. The two major user-written components of a ISE project are the