XVA1 is complete!

The XVA1 project have been almost complete for a couple of months already. However, in last November 24 Xilinx rolled out a new-and-improved version of their toolchain, Vivado 2020.2.

So I decided to ensure the project was built with the latest and greatest tools and migrated it to 2020.2. It turned out that it didn’t get time closure on the new tools, and nobody seemed to have the smallest clue on why.

Some constructs were much more elegantly synthesized in the new version, though. This was allowing to abandon many manually-hex-instantiated LUTs and switching to ‘natural’ inference (which would make future maintainability and ports much easier). So I decided to stick to 2020.2 and work on the time closure issue.

Took a while, but got it perfect. XVA1 is built with latest and greatest, all smoke and regression tests passed with flying colors and a few more modules are now formally verified.

So 1.0 is out. From an operational standpoint, only one rc9 issue was fixed (breath control jumpy when range set to negative values). All the rest is unchanged.

Also fixed an issue in XLoad which made the loading of tuning definition files painfully slow. Did update the sysex code for XVA1 in the User Manual (44) too.

Finally, I put together an Installation Guide for the firmware, which avoids the user having to get back to the website. If you have a chance, please peek at it, any feedback welcome.

So yes. It’s time to tell everyone in your neighborhood about it!

Happy XVA1ing everyone, and thank you.

https://www.futur3soundz.com/xva1-synthesizer