VHDL LFSR Output through FPGA board SMA connector

Question

I recently started working on an FPGA project for school, I have never worked with VHDL before so I tried my best to piece my program together. Overall, my goal is to make a prbs or LFSR to generate randomly. My vhdl code checks out in xilinx ISE software and runs in testbench fine but I need to flash the project to the board and connect an oscilloscope to one of the SMA connectors on the board, My question is how can I i forward my outputs to a single SMA connector on the Spartan 6 board

library IEEE;
use IEEE.std_logic_1164.all;

entity LFSR is
port (
  clock    : std_logic;
  reset    : std_logic;
  data_out : out std_logic_vector(9 downto 0)
 );
 end LFSR;

 architecture Behavioral of LFSR is

 signal lfsr_reg : std_logic_vector(9 downto 0);

begin

 process (clock)
variable lfsr_tap : std_logic;
begin
if clock'EVENT and clock='1' then
  if reset = '1' then
    lfsr_reg <= (others => '1');
  else
    lfsr_tap := lfsr_reg(6) xor lfsr_reg(9);
    lfsr_reg <= lfsr_reg(8 downto 0) & lfsr_tap;
  end if;
end if;
 end process;

  data_out <= lfsr_reg;

end Behavioral;

Now I just want to forward the output/outputs to an SMA connector so I can get the results on the oscilloscope, any help would be great

Answer 1

You just need to map your I/Os to actual pins on your FPGA chip. This is done in a constraints file (typically a .ucf), which you can either hand-edit (it's just text), or let a tool handle for you.

In the newer ISE tools PlanAhead is responsible for this - you can open it from the ISE Processes Pane (select User Constraints -> I/O Pin Planning (PlanAhead) - Post-synthesis).

This opens PlanAhead and gives you a list of the I/Os in your design (your clock, reset and data_out). Now you just need to map these to the correct FPGA pins. Have a look in your board documentation to find the locations of your clock-input, push-buttons (for reset) and SMA connector.

PlanAhead should create the .ucf file for you, and add it to your project. Afterwards you can edit it in the ISE editor - it's pretty self-explanatory once you have some initial content in it.

Also, check out this Xilinx guide (from page 100 and onwards) for a step-by-step guide.