[Oberon] Digilent Spartan 3 Board

[Treutwein Bernhard]

Hi everybody,

in the mean time I've got two suggestions by Digilent and Numato.

Digilent suggest Nexys 4 in a very short mail (I guess this one:
https://digilentinc.com/Products/Detail.cfm?NavPath=2,400,1184&Prod=NEXYS4).

Numato suggest this one: http://numato.com/waxwing-spartan-6-mini-module
together with an development board, which is currently in pre-release state:

>>The development board (Minimudule needs to be installed on this board)
>> has the following features.
>>
>>* Power supply necessary for all logic and peripherals
>>* FT2232 USB Communication
>>* 4x PMOD compatible connectors
>>* 1 HDMI connector (buffered)
>>* 1 VGA connector
>>* 16x2 alphanumeric LCD
>>* 2x 7 segment LED displays
>>* 8 general purpose LEDs
>>* 8 Microswitches for user input
>>* 1 dip switch
>>* Onboard SPI flash programming support (No need of platform cable for configuration)
>>* JTAG connector
>>* SD card slot
>>* PWM Audio out jack
>>

Does somebody with more experience in FPGA have an opinion?

I am tempted to give Numatos Waxwing a try ...

regards
--
  Bernhard

>-----Original Message-----
>From: Paul Reed [mailto:paulreed at paddedcell.com]
>Sent: Tuesday, March 04, 2014 2:11 PM
>To: ETH Oberon and related systems
>Subject: [Oberon] Digilent Spartan 3 Board
>
>Hi all,
>
>>> I feel sad that Spartan 3 is becoming obsolete.
>> I agree. The more recent Spartan-3E based Nexys-2 board from Digilent
>
>A few points of background about the Digilent Spartan 3 board which may
>help.
>
>First, don't be sad!  ;-)  Everything of course becomes obsolete in our
>world (tech); it's actually useful that Digilent have discontinued this
>board in a rather timely fashion (just after I released the binaries for


[...]


>
>(The RISC processor itself is relatively easy to port to other FPGA
>boards.  I have had it running in various guises on Xilinx FPGA boards
>made or not made by Digilent, and also on an Altera FPGA board, for
>example.)
>
>The real killer feature about the Spartan 3 board is the 1MByte
>(2x256Kx16) of extremely fast (10nS) static RAM (as in, real good
>old-fashioned SRAM, not pseudo-SRAM for example!).  I haven't found a
>board which provides sustained, completely random-access cycles anywhere
>near as fast; anything else I have seen would imply a memory interface
>which would dwarf the rest of the whole design in its complexity.  Of
>course, I'd be delighted to be proved wrong about this. :)
>
>HTH
>Paul
>
>
>