spartan-3e starter kit

They are shipping as we speak. There was a huge demand for it.

The Xilinx Online Store *STILL* says "Notify me when available", and I requested that notification many months ago. Since they haven't been taking orders for them, to whom are they shipping them?

Huh? Who? What? Uh... Where from?

I've been looking at the Xilinx Online Store and the digilentinc site and have seen nothing. The only order entry I've seen was from distribution and I didn't trust it to do any better than the first two sources. I'm talking 3e starter kit, not the sample pack.

I spoke with Avnet yesterday, and they told me they were getting a shipment of the starter kits in on march 9th.

- Tom

John_H wrote:

That sounds like possible date. Yesterday I did see one Spartan3e starterkit board at Silica's boot at Embedded in Nurnberg. They only have that one board so will be shipping as soon as they get the boards.

Antti

Just found this:

Henk

How does USB programming work in that device? I don't find anything (on first and second glance) about that in the schematic.

It is just an integrated USB config option. See page 28. Henk

It could be nice to use it on own designs. A schematic would show what's needed...

the schematic of that part is removed from the schematic printouts, its a duplicate of platform usb cable - as the platform cable pld on starterkit board is in non-BGA package it should be fairly simply to pull up the pins that go to on board jtag and use the starterkit as normal platform usb cable :)

Antti

However to my knowledge, the "platform usb cable" is considered as their IP by XILINX and no documents to build your own cable are available...

gosh! just take a buzzer enabled multimeter and sit down for one evning, there are some wires between the cypressFX2 and coolrunner, that is it basically. the usb cable does not contain any preprogrammed firmware (except usb vid/pid,,) so you just duplicate it, then force impact to perform PLD update and ready you are !

sure xilinx doesnt document how to do this, but it really isnt that complicated.

Antti

I'd be glad if you share your experience ;-)