From a purely functional perspective it is quite likely that the J-LINK pod could be used to program a Xilinx FPGA. However there a few things that come in between "theoretically functional" and "realistically operational" that could lead to no end of frustration. First of all on the hardware side the JTAG pods for the different applications may not have the same exact types of connectors with identical pinning assignments. Another hardware issue is that the differing pods may use separate schemes to deal with and provide voltage level adaptation to the tatget device VDD levels.

On the software side the logical interface and protocols used on the host accessible side of the JTAG adapters is highly likely to be different between various pods. This factor prevents the standard programming tools in the Xilinx FPGA development suite from knowing "how to talk to" the alien adapter. That is unless of course the Xilinx suite comes with drivers or custom interface selection for various types of JTAG adapters. In the case of a vendor like Xilinx it is rather unlikely that they would spend too much energy on making other foreign adapters work with their software. They probably have their hands full already just trying to support their own adapters (they have several versions) then yet try to deal with those from other vendors.

Michael Karas