Eval board advice

Ed

I don't think you are going to have much luck on your budget. I agree about Webpack thing and indeed on our products we in many cases choose to use a XC3S400-1500 as device options for exactly that reason. You aren't likely to get a Virtex based board for US$300 due to the price of the silicon although we may have something that will get close to that for students coming in our line. Commercial pricing will be a bit more. Details of the products coming won't released for a little early even for me to talk about other than there will be some boards very different concepts to our existing lines.

EDK has previously been available as trial software but I believe the current Xilinx thinking is not to offer that at present.

As to modular boards we have a reasonable range including RS232, RS485, ADC, PS2 to name a few. I hope we will also be finally showing the DDR2 and SDRAM modules for Raggedstone1 this week or maybe next. They have been assembled and awaiting test for those interested in these. Proving there are not any issues they they will be on sale shortly after.

We should have some more lab materials appearing on our site shortly. They have been prepared some time ago but never made it to the website yet. If anyone would like to contribute materials I'm hoping we can get a user group area going on our website for people to swap ideas and projects.

John Adair Enterpo> Howdy,

etc...

Hi,

I got a pair of these XUPs when I took my last undergrad digital system design class. Sure, the V2P is not the newest or greatest chip around and falls short in a few areas but the board is otherwise fairly well-rounded for the price... even more so when you consider that the board costs $300 even though the FPGA on it is listed at around $800 - these boards are heavily subsidized by Xilinx.

Before you order this board, you need someone from your university to setup an account with Digilent before you can buy those subsidized boards. After that, you need someone to contact a Xilinx sales rep. to ask for the necessary software to support those boards. Since the company my teacher back then works at is a major Xilinx account in the area, we had no problem setting up the Digilent account and getting Xilinx's authorization for copies of ISE/EDK DVDs and keys. The story says the Xilinx sales rep. was surprised to hear that no software came with those boards.

Your mileage may vary, so delay your order until you have secured both the tools and valid keys should you decide to try going XUP.

John, Thanks for your response. As Daniel mentions, Xilinx subsidizes their silicon so that Digilent can offer the board at a very low price (when considering the value of just the FPGA). The XUP is $300 for educational purposes. It's a *much* larger FPGA (2x the PPC cpu's, nearly an order of magnitude larger in slices and BRAM) than the Virtex II-Pro I worked with. No slouch. Not *the* bleeding edge nor a good idea for new commercial designs but it looks good to learn on. I'll check out your site, although the $/pound exchange is unfavorable for British products in the US right now.

Daniel, Thank you, that is exactly what I needed to know to make the XUP board worth considering. The prof I took the class with does tons with Xilinx products so I'll ask him if he has Xilinx rep contacts. You don't happen to have a rep's contact info, do you?

Accdg to the digilent site, it seemed to allow me to get all the way to credit card # entry in the check-out process with a $300 invoice for the XUP. Do you think I still need an acct with Digilent? I'm eager to buy, but I'll wait to see if I can network to the Xilinx folks.

Another Digilent alternative for $300 is the FX12 board:

Not as feature rich and I don't see much in the way of app notes or reference designs. It does have gigabit ethernet.

-Ed

On Mar 18, 12:27 pm, "Daniel S." wrote:>

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I might have some reps' contact info jotted down on a note somewhere from many months ago but I have no idea where that note is now. If your prof is involved in Xilinx-sponsored research projects or anything else of the sort, he should have some equivalent contacts of his own. I have worked on post-doc projects (telecom/DSP) as an intern and back then, Xilinx was quite happy to sponsor projects that pushed the frontier of FPGA-based applications... they most likely still do today.

As for the Digilent site, yes, it does list the price as $300 when you file the order but Digilent will call back to verify whether or not your school and yourself qualify for the reduced price. Maybe they do not call to verify all orders but they did call for mine, they asked for the school's name, teacher's name, my name and a few other details.

For the FX12, V4 may be newer and able to reach higher clocks... but much of the V4 is taken directly from the V2Pro. If could re-pick my first ~$300 student-oriented board again today, I think I would still go with the V2P30 until a comparable V5 board appears. Filling a VP30 to 25% can happen pretty fast so there is no way I would select anything significantly smaller than that for a general-purpose experimental platform, even more so if both are comparably priced.

Of course, the FX12 board is still a good choice for those not eligible for the $300 XUP deal and/or are stuck with ISE WebPack. But for the k> John,

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Hello John,

Michael Gernoth and I am very interested in this. Can you give us a heads up when the modules are available?

Thomas

I'll put a post up. It will probably go out on our newsletter as well. We are very overdue for a newsletter.

John Adair Enterpo> Hello John,

months ago

Xilinx-sponsored

contacts of

back then,

FPGA-based

Okay, thanks again. I'll check with my prof, see what he says.

(Being new to this group (and never really having used the USENET much) I was curious to see that my original thread was no longer around. Until I realized that it could be hijacked with a simple change of the Subject line! I added the new topic to my original subject line)

Your are right about the pound/dollar exchange rate but to a degree it works 2 ways as we buy a lot of components that are referenced to a dollar pricing so some of our cost base reduces with the current high rate. To a much smaller extent we have the same thing for the euro.

I think even at the current rate we are still competitive which isn't too bad as we build all of the development boards in the UK not exactly known for low cost labour. We just have to be more inventive on how we do things and we do have a high hit rate on first time right boards. I won't say which but a number of our current boards are basically the same boards as came back as initial prototypes for the team to test. It some cases we cosmetically changed minor details like silkscreen and up-revisioned them. As of today I believe we have only ever had one return and it wasn't faulty which is probably better than our competitors. All of that together makes good economics.

John Adair Enterpo> John,

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