Reading old F2.1i schematics

Aldec's tool Active-HDL has capability of importing the Foundation schematics and entire projects. The import utility not only allows printing, but also importing these files into their format, maintain and even convert into an HDL design that can be targeted for any family/device. They show this capability on their website:

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I'm running Xilinx Foundation 4.1i on Windows XP (SP1). It will read (and convert) 2.1i schematics. I also run ISE 6.1i on the same machine and can switch back and forth (but not run both simultaneously) by changing the Xilinx environment variable. Unfortunately Xilinx and Aldec have parted ways, so I don't know how you can get a copy of foundation 4.1i now if you don't already have it.

Version 4.1i also has the ability to output (structural) VHDL from your schematics, but it's not very readable and you'll need to be sure your new environment has the equivalent library components if you want to build from the VHDL.

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I have this same problem. The new Foundation can import back to version 4. Because of a lawsuit between Aldec and Xilinx, they can not ship older versions of the Foundation tools. The newest Aldec tools can't seem to import the 2.1 project. However, I was able to import the version 2.1 into version 3.1 and then read the whole project with the new Aldec tools. What a pain.

They have a utility in the Tools menu that helps to convert the old pre-2.5 schematics to a format that is possible to import. As I remember it also allows to edit the schematics in .sch format before import.

Quite a few of last years and some of this years text books for Digital Design have copies of 4.1 student version. Quite a few are starting to come with student version 6.3.

Alex

What the world needs is a standard schematic file format.

Our policy now is to release PDFs of all schematics with the designs, so at least it's easy to see what's there.

John

Well... wasn't it EDIF that was supposed to become one (ANSI, IEC, EN standards)? The only thing is, that proprietary means money for vendors that own the format... keep the customer dependent on the solution.

EG