Book Software for XC3190A?

The XC3190A was introduced 15 years ago, which makes it hopelessly obsolete. Even if you find the hardware sufficient (no on-chip RAM!), the software is so antiquated that nobody should be forced to use it. Get yourself a modern chip of Spartan or Virtex caliber and of 2003+ vintage. The hardware is cheap, and the software is free, and both are very competent. Happy designing with 21st century stuff! Peter Alfke, Xilinx

Software support for the 3000 series was dropped years ago. What's the copyright date on the book that you are looking at? If the copyright is from the early to mid-90s then the included software will support the 3000 series. If the book has been updated in recent years the chances are they have a slightly obsolete version of Webpack included which won't support the 3000 series. If the book is from the early 90s, what media are the included tools on? Early 90s PCs had 5 1/4" floppies, good luck finding a

5 1/4" floppy drive. If it's on 3 1/2" floppies then you'll be able to read them because 3 1/2" drives are still available, your system might even have on if it's more than 2 years old. If the software is on a CDROM that's a sure indicator that it won't have 3000 series support. By the time that CDROMs became the standard means of distributing software support for the 3000 series had already been dropped.

If what you want to do is to learn how to design with FPGAs it's not necessary to actually build something. My suggestion would be to download a copy of Icarus Verilog (it's free) and a copy of the current Xilinx Webpack (also free). Do design in Verilog and debug it using Icarus. Then you can place and route it using Webpack. 21st century FPGA designers don't spend much time in the lab debugging on the actual hardware, the debugging is done using a Verilog simulator.

ModelSim XE starter is also a free simulator, and supports both VHDL and Verilog. Both languages are widely used.

-- Phil Hays (Who is leaving on a trip today to get a Xilinx badge, among other things.)

The Book is copyright 1999 and available at amazon.de:

But for that ISBN there are 3 Versions of this book !?!?

That is no problem, I have some of these in my personal museum ;)

Oh, I think that will be the problem.

I would like to build something, and as I wrote before I did it with the XC9536 now it should be a little bit more.

I think it would be the best I try to find it in a library before to buy.

Thank you for the usefull information tuxfriend

tuxfriend; If you are concerned about soldering big chips with lots of tiny pins, there are several things you can try:

1) Some companies (Digilent comes to mind) have CPLDs or even FPGAs mounted on a board that plugs into a 40-pin 0.6" wide IC socket. 2) You can buy a CPLD or a FPGA development board. They usually have switches, LEDs, etc plus 0.1" headers that you can use to connect to your specific circuits. Xilinx's Spartan 3 board is around $100 (or is it $150?) 3) Use a toaster over plus solder paste to solder SMD chips. HTH

-Dave Pollum

Hello Dave,

2) is a good choise ($149) 3) 0,8mm is big enough for hand soldering ...but the main problem still exist. I can't belive that there is no more software for my XC3190A in the whole world.

Thank you for your answer!

No problem!

What is a DOS SDK? Do you mean Win3.1 SDK? I have a MS C 1.0 for Win license.

The problem is the Place&Route Tool and the bitstream generation. There is no need for a graphical interface. Do you know the book software or have an idea where I can get the P&R Soft?

Do you have a DOS 3.3 machine to run it on? A DOS 3.3 SDK?

I forget if the XC3190A tools were Windows friendly but they *were* all command-line friendly but still not at all a pretty interface. I'm not sure you'd be happy with the tool performance if you could get those 1990 era tools running unless you used the NeoCad tools to up the performance of the Xilinx software before they bought out NeoCad. You can't get NeoCad keys anymore as far as I know.

I have a moderately old copy of Foundation 2.1 around on CD. It is from circa 2000, and claims to support the XC3100A family of devices. I think Xilinx has the old versions of their software available on their website somewhere. But I would agree with others who are trying to talk you out of bothering with these old devices.

There are many old links to the Xilinx website to the old software. But the oldest version that is available is the webpack 3.3 and there is no more support for XC3000. For a new bigger design there is no question to use the new devices. But sometimes when I have a little project, the XC3190A is the right size - and I have over 100 of this... I would be very interested of a copy of your old copy ;)

Hello Duane Got it!

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You'll need the hardware dongle to run the software too, along with either DOS or win3.1, depending on which version of the software you have. On top of that, the dongles and software don't run on today's faster machines. You'll probably have to resurrect an old system slower/older than a pentium 166 to get it to work. I am pretty sure the last two versions of Xact that supported the 3100 series did come on CDs, but you still needed the parallel port dongle to activate the software. Good luck finding one of those.

For quite a while, the 3100 series was compelling even though it was obsolete for very low power designs because of its low static dissipation. That is no longer true. I can't think of any good reason to use a 3100 series part now. Even free, they are too expensive to use and rather primitive compared with what you can get today for just a few dollars.

Couldn't he use a dos emulator like DOSBox or something like that? That's what I do when I want to play some archaic PC game from back in the day...

Robin

Depends on how it interacts with the parallel port. The issue with the faster computers with the old software is that the parallel port communication gets too fast for the dongle.