lboard2 p. I - spartan-6 slave serial sonfiguration
The core of lboard2 is a Xilinx XC6SLX9 FPGA which was chosen because of the easy to solder TQG144 qfp package. Nowadays it's counted as a low density chip, but it's 9K LUT architecture is powerful enough for a simple audio processing. Spartan-6 hasn't got any non-volatile storage, so it has to be configured on every startup. Xilinx UG380 describes the various configuration options in details.
My configuration method of choice was Slave-Serial, because it was easy to implement with a suitable microcontroller. Basically it's a single data line serial protocol which transmits the configuration file bit by bit. Slave-Serial has several beneficial features: it requires only 5 signals, clock line is free running and the protocol is very easy.
lboard2 sound processing dev board with spartan-6 and aic3204
lboard2 is my take on building a simple DSP application using Xilinx Spartan-6 FPGA and TI TLV320AIC3204 audio codec from the scratch. I thought it's far more interesting to design my own booard instead of buying a commercially available development kit which just works. Currently, lboard2 is passing a loopback test, which means that audio samples are captured with a codec, being received on the FPGA pins, then routed back to a codec's DAC and heard with a headphones. Loopback isn't the most exciting application, so I'm working on a simple Fourier transfer based VU-meter. Once it's ready, I'll post the code, but before that, I'd like to share my experience with Spartan-6 in a series of a short posts tagged with an lboard2 label.
Hoping this information would help beginners to build a working system faster and with less pain.