FPGAs 101

6.6. Synthesis Tutorial

Xilinx's XST synthesis tool is a part of its ISE and Webpack ISE complete development packages. Whereas ISE is a fee-based tool that supports more devices and offers more features, the Webpack is free, with limited features but sufficient for this tutorial. Keep in mind that your synthesis tool may require a different setup and the terminology may be slightly different, but in the end, a third party tool provides a synthesized netlist that will be used in the implementation development phase and an option to output a functional simulation netlist. It is unnecessary for the manufacturers to provide the synthesized netlist, and this may not be provided.

Launch Synthesis Tool

Select Start → All Programs → Xilinx ISE ...