The Xilinx Design Language (XDL): Tutorial and use cases

With the Xilinx Design Language (XDL), the FPGA vendor Xilinx offers a very powerful interface that provides access to virtually all features of their devices. This includes on one side the generation of complete device descriptions containing information about the FPGA primitives and the routing fabric. On the other side, XDL can be used to constrain systems or to directly implement modules or macros for Xilinx FPGAs. In this paper, we will provide documentation on the language and reveal several use cases for this language.