Powering Up ELBERT
ELBERT is powered directly from USB port so make sure you are using a USB port that
can power the board properly. It is recommended to connect the board directly to the
PC instead a hub. It is practically very difficult to estimate the power consumption of
the board as it depends heavily on your design and the clock used. Xilinx ISE has tools
to estimate the power consumption. In any case if power from USB is not enough for
your application, external 5V can be applied to the board. Jumper PWRSEL should be
set up properly to use the board on external power. ELBERT requires three different
voltages. Two 3.3V supplies and a 1.3V supply. Onboard regulators derive these
voltages from the USB/Ext +5V. The board is shipped with test program already loaded
to FPGA and when powering up the board for the first time you can see the test pattern
on LEDs and can interact with the board using the switches.
Generating Configuration Bit Stream for ELBERT
HDL design needs to be converted to bit stream before it can be programmed to FPGA.
ELBERT at this time accepts only binary (.bin) bit stream created by XILINX ISE (
http://www.xilinx.com/tools/webpack.htm [1]). Once the HDL is synthesized, it is easy to
create a binary bit stream out of it. Please follow the steps below to generate binary bit
stream from your design using ISE WebPack.
1. Right click on the “Generate Programming File” option in “Processes” window.
2. Select “Process Properties” from the popup menu. In the dialog box, check
“Create Binary Configuration File” Check box and click “Apply”.
