I was finally able to order a Spartan 3E Starter Kit from Avnet late last week. (Before that the Xilinx site said that it was orderable from Avnet, but the Avnet site said that it was not.) It arrived today, and the preprogrammed demo works fine. I haven't yet loaded any of the other demos, or tried to program any of my own designs.
The kit does noot come with a printed copy of its user's guide, but that's not a problem since the PDF is available for download from the Xilinx site, as are the schematic and gerber files: ttp://
A DVD of Webpack (and demo of ISE) is included, as well as a demo of the EDK.
The kit comes with book "Introduction to Programmable Logic" of about
200 pages, which in not specific to the kit but appears to be a good general introduction to Xilinx CPLDs and FPGAs, and the tool chain.Nine demo designs with doucmentation are also available for download:
I'm thinking about having some prototyping boards made with a connector to mate with the 100-pin Hirose expansion connector on the Starter Kit board. I'll include a 3.3V regulator on my board. Aside from a 0.1 inch hole grid, would anyone have any specific requests for reasonably general-purpose things to add? Most of the common I/O that I want is already on the Starter Kit board, so I mostly intend to use the prototyping boards for very application-specific things.
It appears that the mating connector would be the Hirose FX2-100S-1.27DS, but I haven't confirmed this. If so, it's available from Digikey for $7.07 quantity one.
I think I might add two 270-ohm resistors to the starter kit, between two FPGA pins and the "reserved" pins 2 and 6 of the PS/2 connector. This would allow using both a mouse and keybaord at the same time, with a common laptop "PS/2 splitter cable". I haven't yet chosen which FPGA pins to use.
I hope that Digilent will offer a version of this board with an XC3S1600E chip in the near future. :-)
Eric