Hey All,
Just wondering if anyone has tried out the Spartan-3 starter board offered on Xilinx's website (the 99 dollar one). I am a student developing a project on an FPGA and that seemed like the most cost effective option for me. Has anyone tried it? If so, how is the speed/capacity for your needs? How about the simplified JTAG interface, does that perform OK? Thanks in advance and I look forward to hearing from you.
Chris
schrieb im Newsbeitrag news: snipped-for-privacy@g44g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
its ok, but if you can wait then the Spartan3e kit $149 USD includes also on board Platform USB Cable (sold standalone for $149!) as free bonus :)
-- Antti Lukats http://www.xilant.com
If you are a student you may be able to get Xilinx to donate a couple to your Lab at School!
-Eli
Chris
You might want to have a look at our product Raggedstone1. It has the much larger XC3S400-4FG456C part fitted. Programming cable is included and card can be used in a PCI slot or stand-alone with the optional PCI I/O Header. Details here
John Adair Enterpoint Ltd. - Home of Raggedstone1. The Low Cost Spartan-3 Development Board.
Chris,
I bought the S3 starter board last year for a VHDL senior class project. I implemented a 32-bit CPU in it, and demonstrated a program which detected prime numbers on the 8-segment display. The whole design took about 90% of the chip, but it went smoothly, and for $99, how can you beat it?!
However, like Antti said, today I would spring for the S3E for $149. It has a larger FPGA, more RAM, and a couple more goodies on the board. The only downside is that they are newly released and you may have trouble getting ahold of one.
Cheers,
-Jeff
Well yes actually. The board that is cheaper that a car tank of UK gas.
John Adair Enterpoint Ltd. - Home of Raggedstone1. The US$90 Development Board.
Hi John,
I guess it's a matter of tradeoffs: $9 cheaper, but the S3 board has more switches, a VGA output, a serial output, and an PS/2 port.
And shipping Raggedstone1 to the US is $45.
-Jeff
Yes. It's quite a good value.
For my needs, it was fast enough, and the size of the part was sufficient for a lot of the things I do. I ended up buying the same board with a larger chip (XC3S1000) from Digilent for $150 in order to fit a few of my largest projects.
I'm not sure what's "simplified" about it, but the supplied cable (equivalent to a Xilinx Parallel Cable III) works just fine.
Eric
I'll admit shipping is an issue and we have brought it down a lot based on the numbers we are moving we now have much better rates to us from our courier. That shipping is usually next day if we get an order early in the UK day. We may be able to extend the low cost ship that we use in Europe to US but as yet we don't know what issues we might have in customs clearance. But if guys in the US buy more well it might get a lot better. After all the large players in distribution like DIGI-KEY ship to us for free on orders over $180. A bit ironic as we end up shipping a lot of the parts back on a board to the US more often than not.
Out interest what does a typical US distributor charge for carriage?
The functionality bits differences are now mainly covered by our add-on modules. We are putting together a competative bundles of modules that will be announced soon. They will be extra but you still get better value in my opinion with our bundles. Website photos of the first modules to be released have been done and should appear on our website in the next couple of days. Some pricing too.
Another thing worth mentioning is that if a group of students, or college, get together they can buy a UAP pack of 5,10,20 etc boards at discount of any of our products including the Raggedstone1. The Raggedstone1 specials (XC3S1000,XC3S1500, XC3S2000) will also be made available under this program too TBA. They won't be released otherwise than in bulk buys from strategic customer or in our forthcoming competitions. Also carriage on group buys drops the unit carriage effectively by a lot when spread over say 5 units which is about US$70-80 from my rusty memory so worth doing. We are considering having a US distributor, or division, to handle the level of sales we have in your area but that is probably a while off yet.
John Adair Enterpoint Ltd. - Home of UAP - University Access Program.
I won't comment on the usefulness of the board, as I'm highly biased. :-)
Just FYI, the Spartan-3 Starter Kit is now bundled with the CPLD Design Kit for $99.
IMHO, for new FPGA or CPLD users or those new to digital design, this bundle is fairly easy to use. The FPGA board includes easy-to-use asynchronous SRAM.
There is a more advanced board, the Spartan-3E Starter Kit Board, for $149 that includes DDR SDRAM, parallel Flash, SPI serial Flash, etc. However, it is also more difficult to use for new users. This board is primarily targetted to more advanced designs and to embedded processor (i.e. MicroBlaze) applications.
There are also a variety of Spartan-3/-3E boards provided by third-party companies. Depending on your application needs or interests, one of these boards may include other interfaces or capabilities that you want. Take a look also at the following list, although I'm sure that it does not include all the various vendors.
--------------------------------- Steven K. Knapp Applications Manager, Xilinx Inc. General Products Division Spartan-3/-3E FPGAs
--------------------------------- The Spartan(tm)-3 Generation: The World's Lowest-Cost FPGAs.
Note also you can buy the S3 board directly from Digilent
xess.com also offers inexpensive xilinx based boards.. Same price range as digilents, but not as many on board features ( but they are smaller.. its a tradeoff )
On a recent project I found the 8 big (i.e. not DIP) switches on the S3 starter board REALLY useful, for selecting 1 of n different sets of debug outputs to a set of pins connected to the scope, and also to select one of n signals to display on the seven-seg display. Saves a lot of recompiles to add debug functions to look at different internal states if you can have them all available at the flick of a switch...!
As a learner and experimenter I like the look of that board, but how much does the Xilinx PCI core for the Spartan 3 cost?
Paul.
Hi Jeff, I am planning on implementing a CPU as a personal project. I have a different dev board, but it is loaded with the XC3S200. May I ask the model number of the FPGA on your development board?
The Xilinx core ... a lot ($1995 for a single project license) But keep watch for an announcement from John A. in the near future...
- Brian
A colleague and I have adapted the pci32tlite_oc core from opencores.org to run on raggedstone1. I've also written a Linux driver for it. Both available here:
Not to far away is our own PCI core that will be available free in a lite form for owners of Raggedstone1. Commercial use beyond that will require a reasonably costed license and a fairly low entry point.
The Raggedstone website has just been updated with a link to Manuel's link and some stop-gap photos and pricing of modules is now there too until the new website goes live.
John Adair Enterpoint Ltd. - We are on stand F48 at DATE.
Outstanding!
I just wanted to provide a little more information on this to make it completely clear about the USB cable supplied with the board.
First, some backround. The Xilinx Platform USB Cable is a self-contained USB-based programming cable that provides in-system programming for a variety of Xilinx devices.
The Spartan-3E Starter Kit Board includes a standard A-B USB cable. The cable connects your computer's USB port to the USB slave port on the board to program the Spartan-3E FPGA, the Platform Flash PROM, or the on-board CPLDs. Think of it as an "embedded", single-target version of the Xilinx USB download cable. It is not designed to program devices that are not already on the board.
--------------------------------- Steven K. Knapp Applications Manager, Xilinx Inc. General Products Division Spartan-3/-3E FPGAs
--------------------------------- The Spartan(tm)-3 Generation: The World's Lowest-Cost FPGAs.
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