Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

I _do_ happen to have one laying around from another project, weirdly enough. I've never done FPGA work though, when you say it's compatible with Vivado, what does that mean in practice? I can configure an AMD FPGA, or something more?




Vivado, along with expensive adaptors, supports some JTAG dongles that are just FT2232 with an EEPROM that contains USB descriptors that Vivado recognizes and treats as a (some low cost onboard adaptor for Digilent boards, IIRC) supported adapter. https://gist.github.com/rikka0w0/24b58b54473227502fa0334bbe7...

If you like FT2232, you’ll love the Tigard board that takes a FT2232H and adds level shifters and is basically as tricked out as you can make a FTDI adapter. https://github.com/tigard-tools/tigard


Vivado offers some embedded debugging and logic analyzer infrastructure, which allows you to tap into signals within the design and monitor them from the PC. (For instance, the Memory Interface Generator will report its initialisation status to the PC and if something failed it will tell you what). This is done over JTAG, and Vivado will only support that when using a select few JTAG dongles.

If you're happy to create your own debugging infrastructure (which isn't that hard - almost all FPGAs have at least two dedicated IR scancodes specifically for user applications) then you can use any JTAG dongle supported by OpenOCD.


I think they mean it can be flashed into a programer/jtag interface compatible with vivado. If you want to get started with fpga, may I recommend 1bitsquared.com 's products



Consider applying for YC's Winter 2026 batch! Applications are open till Nov 10

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: