By Nobody 2025-07-26revised 2025-07-26

Purpose

Apply FPGA devices to devlop custom CPU cores for embedded applications.

Hardware

Digilent Cmod A7 FPGA board, Digikey pn 1286-1130-ND, Digilent pn 410-328-35.

• This board has an AMD (nee Xilinx) Artix-7 FPGA, some QSPI flash and a USB interface.
• There are 44 FPGA I/O signals routed to 0.1” spaced pins.

Similar boards

There is a CMOD-S7 using a Spartan-7 FPGA which is lower performance and cost.

Digilent Adept Software

Used to program the board.

Xilinx Vivado Design Suite

Used to create and modify designs.

Go to web site Xilinx Support Download.

Xilinx Vitis Core Development Kit

Used to work with MicroBlaze soft processor.

Support

See Cmod A7 Support.

See Cmod A7 Reference Manual.

Running Vivado in Arch Linux

Why? Because software from that company in Redmond, WA is utter garbage; Nobody no longer uses it.

There are notes in the AUR about Vivado. If yay is installed on Arch, use that.

First enable the multilib repository for Arch, so that 32b applications can run. Find [multilib] section and remove the comment mark to enable the section and mirror list. Then synchronize the package database with -Sy.

sudo nano /etc/pacman.conf
sudo pacman -Sy
yay -S vivado

After all that, it turns out AMD blocks downloads without some kind of user login. Creating such login for some reason did not work so far.

Perhaps some open source tools would be a better choice.