spartan-3e dev board product page

Archive SparkFun Site Questions/Comments
1

Hi.

I just got my spartan-3e dev board today + parport programmer. I’m thrilled with it. I have not seen any other boards like it that break out every pin on the fpga.

My only suggestion is that it might be wise to fix up the product page for it a little bit. Specifically, you might want to mention that it includes a 50MHz (i think?) oscillator. I had no idea until I was looking over the schematic and saw an unlabeled component that attached to one of the fpga clock pins.

Also, the page includes some sort of example bitstream that acts as a bootloader for the spi prom, but the bitstream is targetted for the wrong fpga (xc3s250e)! I think this code might be a bit redundant anyway, as according to [xapp #974, you can actually program this spi prom over jtag. I didn’t test this thoroughly, but I was able to do a successful erase and “blank check” on the prom with this method and it appears to be successful.

otherwise, great product idea and implementation. I am making a daughterboard to plug in for a personal project. This dev board will save me a lot of time when prototyping (don’t need to worry about a power supply or decoupling all those supply pins)](AMD Technical Information Portal)

2

With regards to the SPI-over-jtag, when that code was written, spi-over-jtag was documented, but didn’t actually work in impact ;). Therefore, the core + scripts were written to provide a working programming solution. The initial dev work was done on with a 250kgate Spartan 3E because the 500’s were hard to source at that time. Just changing a variable in the build scripts should be sufficient to retarget the scripts. It was tested with both, as I recall [quite a while ago] but I guess the wrong version ended up on the site.

Cheers,

–David Carne