Spartan-3E starter kit

I promised an answer. The digging took a bit longer...

The good news is that Xilinx has many thousands of S3e100 in TQ144, and hundreds in vq100 packages, as well as many S3500 in several packages. The bad new is that -today- these parts are still ES ("early silicon") which distribution hates to touch, because the parts will become obsolete very soon, once the production version becomes available.

If you need them immediately, order them through your distributor or your Xilinx sales folks. And realize that "6 to 8 weeks" is often exaggerated.

Production S3e100 and 500s are expected this month, and 1600 soon after. And the distis will love to sell them (which they consider their job, even in Europe !).

I have held the almost final version of the S3e500-based evaluation board in my hand. It is dynamite, loaded with features and peripherl circuits, compatible with a slew of inexpensive Digilent add-on boards. Availability starts in December. Well before that, there will be a business-card-size eval board, packaged in a DVD-case, meant as a super-low-cost S3e100 demonstrator.

Spartan3e is really rolling, and will soon be a big success. Too bad that Marketing created expectations that were impossible to meet. Keep the faith, Spartan3e is real, and it is coming! Peter Alfke, Xilinx

So why not put them in the web store....

"Peter Alfke" wrote in news:1130970017.548080.12630 @z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com:

and

their

boards.

Can't wait for December to come! Can I book my order from now?

-Pratip

Any chance of releasing the user manual before the boards show up?

Does that mean Xilinx stuck with the (hopelessly outdated) 40 pins, one ground (Note 1) I/O connector pinout of the older Digilent boards?

Cheap evaluation boards are great resources, but continuing to design and ship evaluation boards for sub-ns edge rate CMOS parts with such a poorly grounded I/O header is just plain silly.

Is there a decent high speed I/O connector provided? ( Doesn't even have to be anything fancier than a dual row 0.1" header, just ground one row of the connector, and properly route some diff pairs out )

or, as I suggested when the S3 board came out:

Brian

(Note 1) and for anyone counting VCC pins as returns, the S3 eval kit has one plane VCC pin, no bypass caps nearby, with IO connector traces merrily crossing VCC plane cuts

Yeah! You'd think ES parts would be prime candidates for the web store.

-- Ed

Brian, your older comments must have fallen on good ears. The S3e500-based evaluation board uses a two-row 100-pin connector with (almost) one whole row dedicated to Ground. Plus two legacy connectors that are much smaller.

2 x 16 character LCD display, rotary shaft encoder input, USB connector, plus other goodies... The manual is still being written, and I offered some help. December is the month... Peter Alfke, Xilinx

Peter Alfke wrote: ...

Which year ;-)

-- Uwe Bonnes snipped-for-privacy@elektron.ikp.physik.tu-darmstadt.de

Institut fuer Kernphysik Schlossgartenstrasse 9 64289 Darmstadt

--------- Tel. 06151 162516 -------- Fax. 06151 164321 ----------

Uwe,

December is the month every year, but its 2005 to get real Christmas presents from Xilinx.

S3e is WAY best FPGA around, so if we have to wait a little more lets try todo wait in piece, this goes more tomyself and my kinda angry comments about s3e availability, I am sometimes like a boy who wants its presents too early.

Antti

Or the Xilinx web store ? - All that infrastructure, going to waste....

And they WILL be on the fast track to the Web-Store (surely?) ?

"Well before" December is March, so I guess now we are in November, i.e. "really close' to December, the info on that nice sounding super-low-cost S3e100 demonstrator, is being posted on the web as I write ? - Photos, users manuals, actual Prices, usual stuff....

-jg

I suspect Steven Knapp's past comments on the I/O connector grounding were far more effective than mine...

Great!!! Is that the Hirose 100 pin as used on the XUP-V2Pro board?

OK; the S3E board webpage description says "three 40-Pin Expansion Connection Ports", which is what had me worried about high-speed I/O.

Even a rough draft with schematics & connector pinouts would let folks get a head start on designs.

thanks, Brian

Guys, let's make a deal: I give you a bit more, more early, and more honest information than you can read in the press releases. You, in turn, stop molesting and attacking me whenever I write anything about dates and avilability. I am not in marketing, but I am reasonably honest, and I believe in what I write (or I just don't write about it.) Isn't that good enough? Peter

Sounds good to me. I don't think anyone attacks you, but there is a general grumble about the state of roll-out-slippage.

ie ES devices really do sound like candidates for Webstore ?

When a demo-PCB is as close as next month, then posting info on what's comming, will be generally appreciated.

Everyone here can understand the PCB mfg cycles - often the paperwork approval takes longer : so posting a price, avail in XX weeks, helps everyone.

-jg

Peter:

Don't let grumbling bother you! I appreciate your help!

-Eli

Thanks for the friendly remarks. In case people want to know what Marketing says about the imminent S3e evaluation boards (including pictures... ) here it is:

http://web/xroads/news/articles/spartan3board/index.html

Cheers Peter Alfke

I'm guessing that it's a Xilinx internal URL? It certainly doesn't work here, even if I prepend a

or put that in place of "web".

I'm looking forward to see what I can play with. For the moment I'm most interested in what the expansion connectors will be (manufacturer & pinout, approximate at least). My biggest hope is that it will be .../spartan3eboard/index.html.

Eric,you are right. My mistake. Just wait a few days more... Peter