I've been eagerly awaiting the September arrival of the Spartan-3E Starter Kit, but today the Xilinx Online Store indicates that the target availability is now December 2005.
Sigh.
I'll have to lay out my own board and try to get some XC3S500E chips through distribution. Though I'll still likely buy the start kit when it becomes available.
Had an email recently to say that Memec have abandoned their S3E board & would I like an S3 board instead of the 3E board I ordered at X-Fest..... Annoying thing is I only ordered it to get the software, which they won't ship seperately. What a joke.
And the Xilinx webstore has no stock of any S3 parts either..... If I was about to start an FPGA design-in I think I'd be seriously looking at Altera right now....
If you use linux, then you will probably avoid using windows. Can you even do Altera development using Linux? Lots of developers using FPGA's are hobbiests and enthusiasts. Usually that == linux users. Xilinx's Linux support is excellent.
That being said, I will admit that although I managed build the xilinux_pp driver under 2.6.11&13, I can't seem to get the Webpack version of iMPACT to use it. So, I'm stuck trying to take the Xilinux created SVF file and use it to program the XCR02S on the S3BOARD via jtag. It is a shame that Xilinx went so far, did so much great work to make the webpack run under linux and then didn't spend the (comparatively small) extra effort to make the xilinx_pp driver work. I was going to start adding debugging the kernel driver to see what Webpack was trying to do but haven't had time yet.
OT: I'll go on for what it's worth here is my attempt to use the driver
-- I'm guessing I'm not making the correct /dev/ entries for iMPACT. Maybe someone else knows if this is possible?
Jeff
root@jcarr:/home/gpl_xilinx_driver/xilinx_pp# make make -C /lib/modules/2.6.11-1-686-smp/build SUBDIRS=/home/gpl_xilinx_driver/xilinx_pp modules make[1]: Entering directory `/usr/src/kernel-headers-2.6.11-1-686-smp' CC [M] /home/gpl_xilinx_driver/xilinx_pp/xilinx_pp.o Building modules, stage 2. MODPOST
I have no idea whether it works on a 2.6 kernel. But I notice you didn't mention installing the windrvr6 and xpc4drvr drivers. I believe these are needed before loading the xilinx_pp driver (at least that is what I do). In my 2.4 kernel, I have in /etc/rc.d/rc.local:
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