a new spartan3E 1600 starter kit available ?

Woo Hoo ! _And_ it apparantly has Stepping 1 silicon. Thanks for the heads-up.

Thanks to OP for the info. I received my kit from Digilent yesterday.

(What's different about stepping 1?)

It _is_ very spartan -- it ships with exactly: the board, a power dongle, and a usb cable. The board runs a little self-test upon power on, but I'm a bit concerned that the regulator chip gets burning hot, in fact the area in a 1cm radius looks burned!

Even though the Digilent page and the schematics claim 32 MiB, it features a 64 MiB DDR SDRAM, just like the regular Spartan 3E starter kit.

My only disappointment is the very minimal documentation and the complete lack of a pre-cooked constaint file. The pin assignment is different from the regular Spartan 3E starter kit, so you can't just reuse the constaints from there, assuming you could locate a comple description for that.

I started building my own based on the schematics, but it seems completely crazy that every user would have to go though this pain. Even then, what are the IO standards supposed to be? In the Xil3S500E_Serial_Flash_v81, the sys_clk_in is given as LVCMOS33 where as most every else it's given as LVTTL? Does it not matter?

Thanks, Tommy

Dang. I'm happy I didn't just turn my board on with my new design and expect it to work with possibly damaging results.

I expected the board to be the exact same board as the 500E Starter Kit.

I'm getting the .ucf sent to me now and I'll pass it along to you, Tommy, at your gmail address. It appears the status - even though we've purchased the board - is kind of "pre-release" and we should expect more documentation in the near future.

I'm told this board should (at some point) be mostly supported through Xilinx rather than Digilent, Inc.

There are quite a few differences, some surprising, but mostly it's good news, ie. J1 and J2 is no longer shared with FX2. Now if only they had allocated more bits to the video interface :-(

AAAAAARRHHHGG :-)

I had just painstakingly recreated the UCF based on Appendix B in the UG230 + the schematics differences. Oh well. Thank, I look forward to it.

Regards, Tommy