spartan3 board for newbie: xilinx XC3S200 starter kit or nu-horizons XC3S400 board???

Hi guys,

I am mostly a newb at fpga design, although I did a teeny bit of work on a Spartan II design a few years ago in verilog.

Anyway, I would like to learn vhdl, and get a development board because I like to supplement endless reading of textbooks with some hands-on experiments. I will probably purchase Ashenden's book soon.

So, I have found two starter boards which look interesting...the $99 Spartan 3 starter kit from Xilinx, and the $164 Spartan 3 starter kit from Nu Horizons.

Before I saw the Nu Horizons board, I was ready to get the Xilinx starter kit. Now, I am torn between the two. I know nothing about the Microblaze core...does the Nu Horizons board come with all the IP you need to do endless experiments with this core, or do you need to pay the $495 edk to Xilinx to get usefull IP? If you get everything you need with the $164 Nu Horizons board, then I am sold on that, because I have several projects in mind that would greatly benefit from the larger Sparten 3 part, the 64MB of sdram and the 32MB of flash. The D/A is very nice too...I have an application for that as well.

Opinions?

Thanks!

Hank

Reply to
Hank
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Hi Hank,

I'm currently investigating hte same products. You might also take a look at the boards from digilent or memec, especially if you want a VGA output port. But I figure that it shouldn't be too difficult to prototype one myself.

Btw, I assume the 64MB and 32MB of RAM and ROM refer to 8MByte and

4Mbyte respectively. Can someone please confirm this for me.

Has someone out there used this particular board and have any comments?

Thanks,

Edmond

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Reply to
Edmond Cote

Hi,

The spartan 3 kit from Nu Horizons doesnt come with EDK (for microblaze) as standard. You have to buy it separately. The kit works with the free ISE Webpack. You just need a parallel port cable. The kit is really good. It has A/D, D/A, config flash ,LCD and others.

Hope this helps

Makesh

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Reply to
Makesh Soundarajan

That's the right book. Learning vhdl has more to do with your simulator than the board. Pick the board with the interfaces you need.

-- Mike Treseler

Reply to
Mike Treseler

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I'm interested in this board as well. But instead of using SRAM (as in Xilinx's board), this board use SDRAM and I haven't design SDRAM controller before. Does the board come with design example for the SDRAM controller? Anyone have the experience of using this board with free SDRAM controller cores from internet?

Cheers, Joe

Reply to
Joe

Hi Joe (and others),

I placed an order for the board earlier this week and should receive it by early next week sometime. I'll keep you guys posted with my impressions, etc.

Edm>

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Spartan 3

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benefit from

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Reply to
Edmond Cote

Well I received my Nu Horizons board. Don't expect much in the way of example code, or information beyond datasheets. In due time, I'll try and host a website and post some code for some of the peripherals om board... (does one already exist?)

A simple question for whomever has already used it. How would one go about writing data to the flash ROM. I'm only asking as honnestly I haven't read through the data sheet yet, is a JTAG cable required for that?

Edm> Hi Joe (and others),

Reply to
Edmond Cote

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