I’ve been working with FPGA(s) again for the past few weeks. I was set back by the price of programmers. I’m currently working with the spartan 6 and noticed it costs a good $200 for a cable to program the FPGA.
http://www.xilinx.com/products/boards-a … B-II-G.htm
The lab I’m working in has some cheapo little $88 development boards with built in programmers…
http://www.xilinx.com/products/boards-a … MB-LX9.htm
Which begs the question, is there a cheaper standalone programmer out there than the USB one mentioned above from Xilinx?
If so where can I pick it up? Does SparkFun have anything?
Thanks!!!
A low-cost cable is available from Digilent:
http://www.digilentinc.com/Products/Det … d=JTAG-HS1
I’ve got one of these:
http://www.digilentinc.com/Products/Det … P-USB-JTAG
It works very well.
Cheap clone cables are available from Chinese suppliers on Ebay. I’ve also got one of those, and it works OK. I’d forgotten I’d bought the Digilent one. 
I know I’m practicing a bit of thread necromancy here, but I got a simple parallel port programmer from some Canadian outfit via ebay for around CDN$20. It’s supported via the latest version of Xilinx’s impact software.
It doesn’t have any RAM, which was very short-sighted of them.