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EP1C12 or XC3S400?

I have not seen that. I downloaded the Xilinx version info and did not see anything relevant in the manual. In particular, my concern is how to acutally hook the board up and get it to work without the Altium tools. The connector on the eval board is not standard and is designed to work with their cable and PC software talking to the parallel port. I belive it will require Altium software to make this work.

The board does have a stereo output which is driven by an FPGA output pin. I assume they intend for this to be driven by a PWM output. They also supply a crude DAC for the VGA outputs. It uses three bits driving different value resistors.

For my needs it is very short on user IO. They only bring 36 pins to connectors and has many pins on the FPGA unconnected.

I find it interesting that it has both keyboard and mouse PS/2 connectors. With the VGA output, this could be used for video games and such.

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Rick "rickman" Collins

rick.collins@XYarius.com
Ignore the reply address. To email me use the above address with the XY
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Arius - A Signal Processing Solutions Company
Specializing in DSP and FPGA design      URL http://www.arius.com
4 King Ave                               301-682-7772 Voice
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Reply to
rickman
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It will work with the standard Xilinx toolset (ISE 6.x, impact). The parallel port cable is pin compatible with the Xilinx download cables at the PC end (standard JTAG programming chain) but adds an additional JTAG channel for Altium's special "soft" chain.

Reply to
John Williams

Ok, that makes sense. I exchanges about a dozen emails with one of Altium's tech people and I still did not get an answer that gave me confidence that my question was understood. I guess they feel it is obvious that the vendor tools are used to do the download.

Does Altium use the same cable with both the Spartan 3 and the Cyclone version of the boards? Are the same parallel port pins used by the Quartus and the ISE software? Or did they design the cable to accomodate both sets of connections in one cable?

--

Rick "rickman" Collins

rick.collins@XYarius.com
Ignore the reply address. To email me use the above address with the XY
removed.

Arius - A Signal Processing Solutions Company
Specializing in DSP and FPGA design      URL http://www.arius.com
4 King Ave                               301-682-7772 Voice
Frederick, MD 21701-3110                 301-682-7666 FAX
Reply to
rickman

I had noticed a few issues with the Altium schematics for their FPGA boards earlier. But I was looking closely at the Altera version of the schematic and realize that they have actual wiring flaws in the drawings! The PP_HARD_TDI signal has no connection to the parallel port connector and the PP_HARD_TDO signal runs over top of a resistor and may actually be shorting two nets!!! Isn't Altium selling the eval board to get you to evaluate their tools including schematic capture and board layout??? This is not much of a recommendation.

On the page with the FPGA many of the net lables are turned around and upsidedown and lie over top of other net labels so that they can not be read. Maybe it's just me, but I would not even consider buying software that the makers find hard to use. I don't' think I can even make these mistakes with Orcad. The software is not that "capable".

--

Rick "rickman" Collins

rick.collins@XYarius.com
Ignore the reply address. To email me use the above address with the XY
removed.

Arius - A Signal Processing Solutions Company
Specializing in DSP and FPGA design      URL http://www.arius.com
4 King Ave                               301-682-7772 Voice
Frederick, MD 21701-3110                 301-682-7666 FAX
Reply to
rickman

I think that the cables are the same (straight connect parallel ribbon cables) but the pin designations at the PC end are different. This is because the drivers for the cable are located on the evaluation board itself and not in the cable connector. The Cyclone eval board looks like a ByteBlaster cable to the software on the PC and the Xilinx eval board looks like an ISE compatible cable (eg. Parallel 3 cable).

Reply to
John Williams

It looks like that is just an artifact of a bad translation to Adobe Acrobat format (.pdf).

The original Altium DXP schematics don't have these problems:

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Reply to
John Williams

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It looks like these are Altium software files of some sort, so I can't view them. But the issues I saw in the schematic PDF files are not the sort of problem that Acrobat could cause. I guess they are just an older version with some bugs. I noticed that on the Altera board schematic, the PP_HARD_TDI signal is not even connected to the parallel port connector and the PP_HARD_TDO signal is not connected correctly, it looks like it shorts across the pullup resistor.

--

Rick "rickman" Collins

rick.collins@XYarius.com
Ignore the reply address. To email me use the above address with the XY
removed.

Arius - A Signal Processing Solutions Company
Specializing in DSP and FPGA design      URL http://www.arius.com
4 King Ave                               301-682-7772 Voice
Frederick, MD 21701-3110                 301-682-7666 FAX
Reply to
rickman

Another word of warning... Altium also said their FPGA Software would work without the FPGA development boards... just as the boards should work without Altium.. . unfortunately... there's a slight hic-up... Nextar needs to talk to an Altium board to start-up. opps...

As a long time user of Protel and Altium I support them.. I would just like to point out that you should be very cautious... You might want to ask on the DXP tech forum for answers (forums altium com) just add dots. There are a lot of users out there... some might be able to get the board working with Quartus or Xilinx. Otherwise I would have grave doubts.

Simon

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compatible

Reply to
Simon Peacock

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My guess is that the PDF files that are posted on their web site were not created correctly from the original schematics.

The original schematic of the Altera board parallel port interface shows PP_HARD_TDI connected through a 100 ohm resistor to parallel port pin 8 (D6). It shows PP_HARD_TDO connected through a 100 ohm resistor to parallel port pin 11 (BUSY).

Reply to
John Williams

formatting link

I don't want to beat a dead horse, but it is not very common to goof up making a PDF file. The Acrobat software installs a printer driver that is used just like a printer, but it produces a PDF file; WYSIWYG. I use this very often and I never have any issues with it. I have never seen it add lines, remove lines or turn text around.

These mistakes were either due to someone printing out an old version of the drawings or possibly the Altium software not printing correctly.

--

Rick "rickman" Collins

rick.collins@XYarius.com
Ignore the reply address. To email me use the above address with the XY
removed.

Arius - A Signal Processing Solutions Company
Specializing in DSP and FPGA design      URL http://www.arius.com
4 King Ave                               301-682-7772 Voice
Frederick, MD 21701-3110                 301-682-7666 FAX
Reply to
rickman

Full agreement here.

Reply to
John Williams

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