Xilinx FPGA with Labview?

[NiAchilles]

This may be a ridiculous question so feel free to ridicule and throw (virtual cabbage) at me but I was wondering if it was possible to program a Xilinx FPGA with Labview FPGA?  I have a board that I am working on with an FPGA that I was going to program using Xilinx ISE Suite and a JTAG programmer.  I prefer Labview for programming so I was wondering if this is something people do.  Thanks ahead of time.  

[Matthew_Kelton]

I typically use the Xilinx command line to program the chips when I need to.  I can call that from LabVIEW using System Exec.vi

[NiAchilles]

So will this allow me to compile Labview FPGA code and program a non-NI FPGA board?  If I bought a Xilinx FPGA development board, could I program it with Labview FPGA?  

[nikodem · Accepted solution]

The answer is short: nope, it is not possible. Only FPGA-equipped devices from NI can be programmed with LV FPGA.

I've heard somewhere that at some point in history it was possible to do that using some clever hacks, but that was like ~10 years ago (?).

[NiAchilles]

Ok thank you, I assumed as much but I just wanted to make sure.  

[sz.benjamin]

As i see sbRIO-9651 has a Zynq 7020 and Xilinx ZC702 has the same Zynq 7020, so there are no any chance to build and run my FPGA LabView on the original Xilinx Zynq development board instead of the sbRIO?

[rolfk]

You could try. But LabVIEW FPGA is a very complex piece of software that consists of a complex LabVIEW plugin, and the according NI-RIO platform driver to access the actual hardware. This NI-RIO driver needs to exactly know what hardware it needs to talk to in order to map the LabVIEW primitives to the correct IO pins, memory resources etc. etc. And some of those configurations you can define yourself with CLIPs (which is a very tedious work) and some are build into specific binary drivers that you can not change. Basically if NI-RIO doesn't recognize the board (and that goes much much further than just the ZYNC FPGA chip itself) it will not talk to it. Protection? Yes but not just for NI but also for you. Embedded development is hard, tedious, time consuming and generally a pain in the ass. NI took care of a lot of that for their boards. They can't and won't do that for other boards.