Xilinx ISE 14.7 Synthesis Hangs on Windows 11

Issue Details

Compiling FPGA designs with Xilinx ISE 14.7 on Windows 11 may hang indefinitely during the "Synthesize" step due to the libPortability.dll library attempting to enumerate network shares, which can fail silently on Windows 11.

Solution

The issue was resolved by applying a known patch for Xilinx ISE 14.7. The file xilinx-ise-win10-hang-hotfix.zip, although originally named for Windows 10, has been verified to work on both Windows 10 and Windows 11 systems. After downloading the patch from a trusted source such as GitHub or the EEVBlog forums, the libPortability.dll files were replaced in the following directories:

• C:\Xilinx\14.7\ISE_DS\ISE\lib\nt64\libPortability.dll
• C:\Xilinx\14.7\ISE_DS\common\lib\nt64\libPortability.dll

Following the replacement, the PC was restarted to ensure the new libraries were loaded. This successfully resolved the synthesis hang issue, and the FPGA compilation completed without further problems.