For Spartan 6 and earlier FPGAs from Xilinx we currently use the Xilinx ISE Design Suite.

ISE is free as in beer but not free as in freedom, this is the only non-FOSS tool used by LiteX Build Environment.

ISE has been end of lifed by Xilinx and is no longer supported. The newer Xilinx Vivado does not support the Spartan 6 or Spartan 3 series of parts.

The Xilinx ISE toolchain is 6GB and will take many hours to download.

• Download ISE Design Suite, 14.7 (Full Installer for Linux, TAR/GZIP 6.09 GB, MD5 Sum: e8065b2ffb411bb74ae32efa475f9817) from https://www.xilinx.com/support/download/index.html/content/xilinx/en/downloadNav/vivado-design-tools/archive-ise.html

• Install into the default location in /opt (requires X11 GUI):

tar xvf Xilinx_ISE_DS_Lin_14.7_1015_1.tar
cd Xilinx_ISE_DS_Lin_14.7_1015_1
sudo ./xsetup

• Register with Xilinx (free) and get a (free) "ISE WebPACK License" from Get License page. Your license, once generated, will be emailed to you. It can also be recovered as follows.

  1. Go to Get License page.
  2. Log in if required.
  3. Confirm your profile details.
  4. You should end up at the "Product Licensing" page.
  5. Use the "Manage Licenses" tab to see your existing licenses.

• Copy your license into ~/.Xilinx/Xilinx.lic

• Ensure licence is activated by checking ISE:

source /opt/Xilinx/14.7/ISE_DS/settings64.sh
ise

Go to Help > Manage Licence..., ensure on the Manage License tab you can see your WebPACK licence and it is green. The WebPACK license will be named something like WebPACK, V_WebPack or Web_Package (depending on when you got your license you might have all of them!).