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Ivysim Quick ISE

Rapid Development For Simple FPGA Projects

The Quick ISE tool accelerates simple Xilinx FPGA projects. Even big projects are assembled from simple projects. This tool can save you time developing your building blocks. It is a good partner to Xilinx Starter Kits.

The tool assumes you are going to use Xilinx ISE (Webpack is sufficient). Required project information is:

  • Top level name
  • Xilinx Part
  • Location of UCF
  • Locations of up to 10 VHDL files

The tool runs six processes from the Xilinx tools:

  • Synthesis
  • Translate
  • Map
  • PAR
  • Bitgen
  • Download

Quick ISE emphasises speed and ease of operation. Each of the processes can be started with a keyboard shortcut, Ctrl-1 for Synthesis up to Ctrl-6 for Download. Out-of-date dependent processes are run first. Console output and tool reports are displayed in a big text window.

Download

Version 1.0
Operating System MD5SUM Download
Windows 8c508888c445e727efb4e1a6d1703e22 quickise10.exe
Linux 8fcf87124502397b7879f334fa354114 quickise10.bin

How It Works

Xilinx ISE must be installed. Quick ISE assumes the Xilinx tools are properly installed and the PATH environment variable includes the path to a Xilinx bin directory. A standard installation of Xilinx ISE (including Webpack) is sufficient.

Download and copy this tool to a project directory. Run the tool and fill in the project information. Relative filenames are used so the whole project can easily be copied anywhere but still work.

A file is written in this directory when the tool closes, quickise.dat stores project information. When Quick ISE is restarted the previous project settings will be read from here. Do not edit this file directly.

Quick ISE creates a subdirectory called work when synthesis is run for the first time. Creating reports and compiled files in a working subdirectory keeps your source files and project settings free from contamination. Subdirectory work can be deleted to clean a project before archiving. The working files can always be regenerated by running Quick ISE again. Include a copy of this tool (approx 1.5MB) in project archives so you will be sure to have the means of easily rebuilding later. You can save many copies of this tool. See the licence section below.

Why Quick ISE?

There is a time and place for using the fully featured ISE graphical user interface with all its integrated features. There is another time and place when a less cluttered and faster approach is helpful between VHDL and download. Writing a script or DOS batch file for command line tool invocation is the traditional approach to speeding up the Xilinx flow. Quick ISE provides the same level of speed without having to get involved with all the fiddly command line options. It works if you don't need to deviate from the defaults.

If Quick ISE does not offer the features you need then 3 possible alternatives are available:

  1. Use Xilinx ISE
  2. Write your own Script or batch file
  3. Contract Ivysim to write a bespoke tool for you

Licence

Ivysim Quick ISE is copyrighted software. Version 1.0 is free to download and use at work or home. You may make multiple copies and freely redistribute them.

Feedback

Quick ISE is not meant to replicate Xilinx's ISE fully featured graphical user interface. It is meant to feature a very standard flow with default options. If you think of any additional features that really belong in a streamlined flow then we would be pleased to consider them. Of course bug reports are welcome too. Please include quick ise in email subject lines to get through the spam filter.

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