LiveDesign, Altium [opinion]

The Altium tools are all very well in principle, but as soon as you start working out of their box things can get difficult.

I presume their IP should plug and play as advertised, but as soon as you design some custom logic of your own it's a different ball game. If you get timing/routing/constraint problems you're going to have to dig into the Altera/Xilinx tools that are running in the background.

IMHO.

Nial.

I intend to use only ISE WebPack. Altium tools are of no interest for me, only the spartan board. I am interested in this starter kit, because it is well priced and moreover there are not many alternatives on Polish market.

I don't know about the LiveDesign board, but I know the Nanoboard (NB-1) does not accept a standard Altera programming cable, so you can't simply use Quartus, for example. Not sure about the Xilinx cable though...

So you might want to check that you can use the Xilinx programming software directly with the LiveDesign board...

Regards,

--
Mark McDougall, Engineer
Virtual Logic Pty Ltd, 
21-25 King St, Rockdale, 2216
Ph: +612-9599-3255 Fax: +612-9599-3266

I have the Xilinx LiveDesign Evaluation board from Altium. The included cable works fine with ISE. If you look at the schematics available on the web

you will see that it is ISE compatible with some additional pins for a kind of soft test interface have fun Joel

Jarek

There are a number of companies doing development boards like ourselves that will ship to Poland. Being in the EEC should mean there are no duties if you are shipped for another EEC country.

John Adair Enterpo> >