Board files for Microzed on any of the carrier cards

Hi there,

Sorry about the issues.

Have you seen the files located on Github?

https://github.com/avnet/bdf

XDC is really what you SHOULD be using for containing the pins and the BDF does use that under the hood.  The BDF files are really used for a development kit.  It allows us to add / or dynamically provide features without maintaining multiple XDC files.

For a PMOD carrier card, you can simply define the IO in the XDC.  There are master constraint files that you can use - and honestly for something like the PMOD Carrier, that constraint is all you need.  It is in all actuality a mapping of a name to a physical pin.

I do not personally see the disconnect you are mentioning.  It might be helpful to work through some of the training materials we have for Vivado.  That might help you better understand the place for an XDC.  While it is not always talked about in detail, it is a crucial part of your design and a BDF is not the end-all-be-all for a design.  The XDC is.  You can currently download the XDC files for the carriers on their product pages.

Lastly, it is one of our oldest development boards out there and typically not recommended for new designs.  The MicroZed was developed in a time where BDF was not really the recommended flow.  It was the responsibility of the design to setup the XDC, PLL, etc. That being said, most of the support effort was around XDC (see the /hdl repository under the boards folder) and most of our efforts are currently around newer products.  MicroZed IS almost 10 years old at this point.  That is not to say we have STOPPED supporting it, we recently posted 2019.1 BSPs for the MicroZed.

--Dan

I have gone through a ton of the training material and the more I go through the more confused I get.  I can only ever seem to find training material that shows how to light up an led or use a switch to light up an led.  It seems that the vast majority of uses that people come up with for fpga's is to turn on leds...  Anyway, sarcasm aside, I am obviously very much lost and have no clue how any of this is supposed to work.  My background is in software development, I am working with an electrical engineer who worked for IBM for 30+ years, has multiple patents in IO circuit design and even he scratches his head at how obtuse Vivado is. His background is in, what I would say, using real EDA tools such as Cadence.  My introduction to Xilinx was in college using ISE, afterwards I picked up Vivado and have been attempting to teach myself using the multitude of training material that has been more confusion than helpful.  Even in my attempts to contact Xilinx (which I discovered is just a lesson in anger management) has led to more frustration than anything else.  You can blame the sales person/engineer at Avnet who convinced me to use the microzed, because as they put it "it is a new board with a lot of support and a huge community behind it".  Obviously when he told me that about a year ago, maybe two, he was lying. 

I have no idea how to use a constraints file, how it is setup, the syntax, or anything about it. The only thing that I have managed to figure out about it is that you can supposedly map physical pins to IP in a block design and something about using it for clock configuration, though I don't see why you would do that since all the clock configuration is done in the block design.  I attempted to wade through the 167 page document from Xilinx regarding it and it read more like an engineer's white paper and was not very user friendly and made nothing clear. 

What I don't understand is why can Diligent provide board files for Vivado that make using their boards super easy, I litterally just drag and drop the Pmod connector to the Pmod IP block out port and that is it.  I don't want to have to go into a file and mess with settings that if I get it wrong it will break (physically) the board I am trying to work with.  All I care about is getting the particular IP I am working on actually working, anything beyond that I expect to be easy and work without hassle. 

Thanks for the feedback. We will investigate improving our Board Definition offering for the MicroZed with Carriers. Thanks for the reference from Digilent and their usage of a Pmod module. I will see if we can do the same. Since MicroZed is capable of running without a carrier, our original focus was providing support for it to operate standalone. This is why you see the 7010 and 7020 versions of the board definitions without carriers.

In the meantime, I can offer a little more advice. You should definitely contact the sales person/engineer at Avnet that recommended the MicroZed. Ask them to introduce you to an FAE who should be able to assist you locally. They may have access to training and advice to help you get started.

Also, we do have several boards with similar names. One of our newer boards that is less expensive than MicroZed is called MiniZed. This is a board we designed specifically for new users to learn and get started. It only has a 7007 single-core device, so it's not as capable as the MicroZed. However, you will find some additional, recently updated training materials specific for this board. We recently release some 2019.1 training based on this board. It will walk you through much more detailed examples step-by-step, beyond the blinky LED example. This training course uses a Relative Humidity Pmod and also walks your through the process of creating a custom IP module. You can read more about this training here.

Announcing FREE Technical Training Courses for Xilinx Embedded Design with MiniZed

Bryan