Hi,
I have made my own SoC based in a E24 Core. There’s the option in FreedomStudio to program the FPGA using vivado, but all the manuals of FreedomStudio only talks about flashing the FPGA. I would like to know if it is possible to program the bitstream using vivado and develope C code with FreedomStudio and implement it on the FPGA.
And if it is possible, you only have to follow the steps of developing code of the FreedomStudio manual, but obviating the FPGA flash part?
Thanks
Hi Pablo,
The FPGA programming within Freedom Studio is for convenience. It’s not required to program the FPGA with Freedom Studio. You can bypass Freedom Studio programming the FPGA and use another tool to program the FPGA for example with Xilinx Vivado Lab Edition. You can then use Freedom Studio to develop and debug code. Note that Freedom Studio is modular and flexible but it’s also designed around SiFive’s FPGA offerings (Arty 100T and VCU118) so other changes may be required to use your custom SoC/FPGA with Freedom Studio environment (Peripherals, memory map, etc).
I don’t think you need to do anything special to use another FPGA programming tool except to ensure the target is programmed before attempting to connect the debugger within Freedom Studio. You would also need to skip the steps of using Freedom Studio to program the FPGA.