Memory width on Spartan-3 boards

Have a look at our product Broadown2. We can definately support 32 bit memory. Details are here

-- John Adair Enterpoint Ltd. - Home of Broaddown2. The Ultimate Spartan3 Development Board.

I'd seen your boards, and indeed they look pretty good - they look more like 'professional' kits than hobbyist ones though, which is both good and bad ...

I like the security of having a led or switch onboard that I can use for debugging (though it would be relatively easy to use all the headers you provide to do the same, granted :-) and using standard memory interfaces is definitely a step forward :-)

The reason why I didn't include your board is that there's no price available and it *looks* expensive. In my limited experience, the combination of the two means it normally *is* expensive [grin].

It also looks as though it's for professional use and, from what I understand of the summary on the page, it can only be controlled via PCI and to do anything useful (ie: custom) with it, I'd need to licence a PCI core from someone (you, Xilinx, whoever), yes ? Does the opencores PCI core work with the board ?

If the board can be used (with my design, not just as an io board) without paying for a PCI core (I'm a hobbyist, as you can probably tell :-), then by all means send me a quote. If you prefer, I'll not divulge the price either :-)

If your pricing is comparable, perhaps you'd want to think about putting it online - that's the main reason I ignored your board in the first place...

Simon.

Don't forgot to check :

- the cost of postage/delivery

- if design examples are available

I'm in UK and Xilinx charge US$29.2 for shipping, while Nu Horizons charge US$75.0 (and no design examples), so I ordered the Xilinx board.

A few more things add to the wish list:

- RS232 (already available om some boards you mentioned)

- PS/2 interface x 2 (one for mouse, one for keyboard as the same time)

- Audio (I2S)

- SDRAM, or

- SDRAM module connector ( for PC100/133 modules - you can plug one in if you wanted to use SDRAM, or if you don't need SD-RAM you can have the pins for user I/O.)

- LCD module connector

- and yes, Xilinx, will you guys make a starter kit with XC3S-400 pleassssssssssse 8-)

- Also it would be nice if vendors can develop I/O boards for the Xilinx's kit (am I getting too demanding here? :-)

Joe

Price for the standard board is £250 / 399 Euro / $399 plus shipping and any applying taxes in your country. The price is buried in a pdf flyer that is linked on the website, look here

The next batch of un-sold boards will be with us in approximately 6-8 weeks.

If anyone else thinks we should have further info on website etc let me know what you think is missing and I will have the website improved to cover any gaps.

The board is aimed at professional users and students but we don't mind selling to hobby engineers. The DIL headers will take stripboard as well as manufactured boards and that was deliberate feature in the board concept.

Twin digit LED is available on plug-in supplied with board.

You don't need a PCI license. The PCI connector can be used as an I/O connector. We have a test board that we might make into a product that already does this. We also have a free standard build on the way that will allow the board to be used as an I/O board without doing anything except programming the Broaddown2 Platform Flash device. I haven't used opencores PCI but I can't think of any reason that it should not work.

-- John Adair Enterpoint Ltd. - Home of Broaddown2. The Ultimate Spartan3 Development Board.

area

Get us a little time and we will satisfy most of these demands by plug-ins. We are UK based so shipping to the UK should be around the £10 mark or less.

Our SODIMM socket will support I/O functions. We have such a board already on the way for our own purposes. One of our standard builds (free) will support this.

-- John Adair Enterpoint Ltd. - Home of Broaddown2. The Ultimate Spartan3 Development Board.

Hi John,

I saw your board, but using DDR-RAM is a bit overkill for most projects, especailly for hobbyists and students. So I assumed your board is for professionals (and therefore expensive? 8-)

Also DDR-SDRAM controller design is more complex that I am not sure if I can cope with that. Possibly the DDR-SDRAM controller design already take 25% of the FPGA :-)

I like the idea of having three versions XC3S400, 1000 and 1500. Having PCI connector is nice too, but I don't need that at this moment. I only want to do some experiments on designing CPU cores, that's why RS232, PS2, VGA and SRAM interface are useful for me. I don't have access to PCB manufacturing facilities so can't do my own add-on boards.

I have been thinking about getting the B5-X300 from

If your company will do a board like the Xilinx starter kit, but with XC3S400 part, I will certainly be very interested (if it is not too expensive) :-)

Joe

It is very hard to hit the mark with everyone. Broaddown2 was never intended for the very cheap end. It is a fairly complex board and has manufacturing costs that go with that complexity. The main leaning to hobby electronics is that the XC3S400 is supported by Webpack and which anything bigger isn't supported.

We are looking at a range of option boards for the DDR2 socket including other memory types. Watch this space.

There may be some things coming out late 2004 that may be suitable for hobby electronics. Watch for product announcements or join our email list if you are interested.

-- John Adair Enterpoint Ltd. - Home of Broaddown2. The Ultimate Spartan3 Development Board.

plug-ins.

less.

already

Joe,

According to

Paul

Joe wrote:

Simon,

There will be an Ethernet Peripheral Board available for the Xilinx Spartan-3 Starter Kit board from Digilent:

I physically have one of these boards right now but do not know when they will be generally available.

Paul

Sim>

Sorry, I wasn't impugning the quality of yours or any other board, what I meant was the 'look' of the board was more professional, in that it didn't have the leds, rs232, lcd/led display etc. that a 'starter kit' typically has. It looks like a 'workhorse' solution rather than the 'prancing pony' with all the extras ... hmm. Not sure about my analogy :-)

Well, it looks good to me :-)

Ah yes, I see that now - I missed it before. I had found the second of the PDF's on your site, but missed the one with the price on it.

When you were referring to 'standard build for an i/o board', I had thought you meant a board configured using the PCI slot, with a fixed download configuration, to be used for testing rather than development.

I now think you mean that the board doesn't need to be in a computer, and that the i/o you're talking about is the configuration of the Spartan-3 with a custom (ie: mine :-) configuration via the pci edge connector, even though not using the PCI protocols. Is this what you mean ?

To be clear, before I cough up £250: is there a direct way of programming the board from within WebPack, or would I need to design a host interface to sit between the PCI edge connector and the download cable ?

Simon.

Simon,

With regard to the Oscillator frequency, have you seen the following in the User Guide

"The Spartan-3 Starter Kit board has a dedicated 50 MHz Epson SG-8002JF series clock oscillator source and an optional socket for another clock oscillator source. Figure A-5 provides a detailed schematic for the clock sources.

The 50 MHz clock oscillator is mounted on the bottom side of the board, indicated as in Figure A-5. Use the 50 MHz clock frequency as is or derive other frequencies using the FPGAs Digital Clock Managers (DCMs). Using Digital Clock Managers (DCMs) in Spartan-3 FPGAs

The oscillator socket, indicated as in Figure 1-2, accepts oscillators in an 8-pin DIP footprint."

Paul

Sim>

Well, I want to do a few things with the board when I get it. I used to use a unix workstation that ran a 32-bit CPU at 33 MHz and life was good. Now my cpu may not be a MIPS 3000, but at 70MHz (estimated, it's doing 65 now with minimal effort on floorplanning), I'd hope it could be compared. Or perhaps I'm dreaming - at any rate I'd like to find out :-)

The core does have wait states for memory (and on-chip peripherals), but one of the things I'd like to do ultimately is fill a line of i/d-cache at a time from the (currently non-existant :-) memory controller using burst mode, which means that I'll want that controllerRAM interface to run as fast as possible.

I also want to try and get it encoding/decoding video mpeg2 if I can. Having seen the complexity of the s/w written to do that, I think that's a pretty big challenge (at least for me :-) but I think others have done it for student projects etc. Having the CPU might make it possible to do some of it in s/w and just have the heavy-lifting in h/w. I'm not sure how much space it'll take to do an MPEG core though - perhaps too much for the '400 device.

Anyway, that's why I'd like lots of memory :-) 256MBytes on an SO-Dimm seems like a good idea to me :-)

I think the crucial thing is i/o pins. It's not too hard to fire up Eagle and make your own add-on daughterboard as long as the i/o is available. Without, it's impossible...

One of the things I like about the Broaddown2 (odd name for a board) is that a *lot* of i/o is available and not in some high-density connector, but with easy-to-use pinouts :-)

Simon

Actually, just to follow that up, John, how much is a '1500 part on the board ? I realise I'd have to fork out for BaseX ('cos there ain't no way I'm paying for Foundation!) but that would have the side-effect of letting me work on Linux :-)

Simon

Thanks Paul. I didn't realize they are the same connector :-)

Joe

Anyway, as you rightly point out, scratch the bottom 3 'cons' for the starter kit - it really is good value, isn't it ?

Simon

Memory is 32 bits wide. I just got the usermanual from their FAE. And I'm going to buy it during the week ;) The great plus of this card is that it has a lot of stuff already on board.

Initially programming by Parallel Cable 4 from parallel port to header on the board. We are hoping to have a more elegant and cheaper solution in a few months. John Adair

Cost isn't set yet but likely to be £299 / E499 / $ 499. We have not set a specific production date for these yet. We would like to put a few XC3S1500 specific enhancements into the design over and above the larger chip size. However if there is enough demand we will accelerate the production cycle but this may be limited by delivery times on XC3S1500 silicon. We now have a rolling delivery of XC3S400 so once we are past the initial demand Broaddown2-400 will be a stock item. Broaddown2-1500 should be become a stock item in about 3-4 months on the current schedule. If you need a solution earlier contact me offline and I will see what can be done. -- John Adair Enterpoint Ltd. - Home of Broaddown2. The Ultimate Spartan3 Development Board.

Actually that timescale sort of suits me. I've got to persuade myself that the $2500 (probably = £1800 after import duty etc.) for Foundation is worth the outlay, just to use the larger part. I work in the video/film industry, and I have an idea which might make it worthwhile, but a few months will give me some time to explore that :-)

What specific enhancements are you proposing ? If you want to take this to private email, that's fine - the same address will do ( snipped-for-privacy@gornall.net).

Simon

Hi Simon,

I've been investigating lately *exactly* the same issues you have, however I finally made a decision and ordered the NuHorizon's board.

While the width of the SDRAM was a deterrent, simply placing two read cycles back-to-back should solve the obvious problem.

For curiousity's sake, are you working on a commericial or academic project?, I am also working on implementing a MIPS based system-on-a-chip. If you pick up that particular board, maybe we could help each other out, since the kit includes next to no documentation.

Please contact me by e-mail if you are interested.

Thanks,

Edm> So, I have a 32-bit processor design which I'd like to move to the