Bitstream Interpretation Library (BIL) Documentation

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Target platform
• Usage
• License

Author:

Florian Benz flori.nosp@m.anbe.nosp@m.nz@fl.nosp@m.oria.nosp@m.nbenz.nosp@m..de

Date:

2012-08-08

Introduction

The Bitstream Interpretation Library, in short BIL, is an open library for reading and interpreting Xilinx bitstream files targeted at Virtex FPGAs. Its main features are:

• Configuration raw data extraction from bitstream files. This is done using an emulator of the FPGA's packet processor.
• XDL design regeneration out of configuration raw data. The required mapping between raw data bits and resulting FPGA configuration is fetched from a database generated in a previous step. At the moment this does not recover a full netlist, but only the inter-tile PIPs.
• Automated configuration mapping analyzation of a device. This is done by correlating a XDL design with the corresponding bitstream.
• Usage of XDLRC device descriptions as data source for available resources and XDL entities. In order to facilitate their usage, they are converted into a much smaller custom format.
• Support for all devices in the Virtex-5 family.

For an overview of the structure of BIL, see Overview.

Target platform

BIL is written in plain C++ and uses no hardware or software platform specific features. It should be compilable by every standard conforming C++ compiler.

Usage

BIL comes as a set of C++ classes that you can use directly in your project. All neccessary headers and implementation files can be found in the src folder.

If you do not want to compile BIL everytime you include it in a project, you may wish to use it as a static library. Therefore, there is a project for building BIL that way. Additionally, precompiled x86 Windows versions of the library are located in the lib folder.

Instead of integrating BIL into your project, you can also use the applications that come along with it. These are precompiled for x86 Windows (in the bin folder). For building them on your own, there are appropriate projects.

At the moment all project files are MS Visual Studio 2008 projects.

License

BIL is licensed under the terms of the FreeBSD License, see included LICENSE file.