Finally, selling my old Xilinx/Viewlogic software package

Too many "Grecian Getaways"? ;-)

[I'll have to followup in email as there are things that are best said "discretely" -- hopefully this afternoon]

Agreed. Glad to see market pressures have forced other solutions!

I had looked into this with the Am9513 many years ago. A reasonably straight-forward design that would be easy to clone. But, decided I didn't want to be supporting folks who couldn't "move on" to more "modern" solutions! (talk about "feeping creaturism"...)

Ah, OK. In my case, I used the 4000 as a custom video processor. Kinda hard to bit bang at those data rates :-/

Exactly.

Yup. And people eventually *did* move on -- to other vendors! :<

I think most EDA tools tend to suffer that fate. Trying to move a design from one toolchain to another (even different versions of the *same* toolchain!) is an exercise in futility. I can't believe there is a legitimate reason for the vendors to do this. Rather, "compatibility" is probably something they "just don't have time for".

(I wonder how much of their slushware is devoted to the chip architecture vs. the user tools?)

Reply to
D Yuniskis
Loading thread data ...

Peter wrote: ...

I have some 4K designs out there that still are built. Chips are available but Xilinx makes sure that no one touches them unless absolutely needed (by price).

I have seen quite a lot of projects that they won via the price. Especially with Spartans.

come on, an UART is nothing that requires a top end 4k. Thats like "that 40 ton truck was not cost effective to deliver my beer bottle @ home."

maybe something like

Then you didn't have the right projects for FPGAs.

- except the ASIC prototyping projects,

Try to make a Software defined radio with a 1300 MSPS ADC, down converters and polyphase filters with one of those Atmels. OK, the ADCs were kinda Atmel or so.

Program your stuff yourself in Verilog or VHDL or Matlab and resist the sticky "easy" way of X/A block generators.

It was a lot of work to make them drop Viewlogic and Omation crap in favor of DOS Orcad.

I still have 4 original dongles, 2 full and 2 APR only.... and there was just a counter inside that counted from 0 to something like 250, the 'something' being the options available. I knew no one in the field who did not know that. You cannot stop a guy with a logic analyzer on his table with a simmple counter. We ran 4 Compaq '286s overnight to possibly get a working 30[249]0 the next morning.

A lot of prehistoric versions are available on Xilinx' web site. I didn't test it because I have it archived anyway. Maybe it's harder to archive a computer that can run it.

Anybody interested in a shiny SILOS simulator license with handbook and original dongle?

regards, Gerhard

Reply to
Gerhard Hoffmann

I recently played with the Altium Designer, seems to be quite OK, and I exported a low noise amplifier in VHDL for the fun of it:

entity MAT02 is port ( base: inout something; emitter: inout something; collector: inout something ); end entity MAT02; ...........

q1: mat02 port map ( base => input, emitter => tail_current_source, collector => left_c )

was quite pointless for an analog design. But then you can spice that amplifier, at least from the original circuit.

(cited from memory under influence of some nice Rioja :-) )

OTOH you can easily bridge the gap between a Xilinx user constraint file and the things on the board that are connected to the FPGA. I like it. Maybe I'll buy it.

Gerhard

Reply to
Gerhard Hoffmann

Gerhard Hoffmann wrote

Sure, to a degree.

I bet the FPGA implementation would have been too pricey for the market though - unless military. So you would have effectively been doing an ASIC prototype with it.

Yes, I recall seeing Orcad libraries at the time.

That was another unfortunate product - their windoze version could not properly import DOS Orcad schematics (really clever).

That's true. I have a schematic of the Viewlogic dongle somewhere. But not the later XACT5 one. I think that one had an EEPROM.

morning.

What is that?

Archiving the PC *is* something a lot of big firms do, apparently. They also archive tape drives.

Reply to
Peter

I am adding my stock of Xilinx parts to the software for sale:

1 x XC3090A-6-PC84C 8 x XC3142-5-TQ100C 4 x XC3042-70-TQ100C 2 x XC3064A-7-TQ144C

All unused.

x----------x

Reply to
Peter

DOS Orcad was a great improvement on its successors. (with kind regards to Tony Hoare)

morning.

XC-3020, 3040, 3090. (regular expressions)

Ooops, wasn't that a 3042, really?

Gerhard

Reply to
Gerhard Hoffmann

Gerhard Hoffmann wrote

What happened to Orcad? Did they go the way of Protel (retreat into massively bloated $10,000 product suites which few people buy)?

morning.

I saw a 286 PC run for an hour or two, routing some small 3k device.

But by the time I was doing this for real, on a 386 /486, it was much faster.

How did you spread the job over four machines??

Reply to
Peter

Peter wrote

A few hours to go :)

Reply to
Peter

I have re-listed it at just GBP 99

formatting link

Reply to
Peter

I have re-listed it

formatting link

Reply to
Peter

ElectronDepot website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.