I assume that by "might need some work" you mean, "might need a lot of work". :) XAPP058, at least at last check (early 2005) was quite bloated and not well suited for 8051s. See my earlier posts on the subject for a discussion of XSVF Executor, an open source utility which will do much of what XAPP058 does, but is much better suited to use on a small microcontroller like an 8051.


That's actually fairly important. My own experiences with midsize Xilinx XC9500 series devices suggest that XSVF files tend to be large with respect to internal flash found on most 8051-class devices. The good thing though is that programming a device only requires one-time sequential, monotonic access to the XSVF data stream. Thus, delivery of the stream over, say, serial port from an external device to the 8051 is quite viable.


As I just mentioned, that could be an issue. How large is the XSVF file for the configuration you wish to program? It would be wise to start out with that, which is a hard requirement, and design the XSVF storage/delivery mechanism from there. Also, when pondering the possibility of storing the XSVF image in internal flash, if you will also be keeping your application code here, you must take its space requirements into account, especially since an XSVF player application (XAPP058 or otherwise) is no 100 byte program.

--Sasha Jevtic