[Oberon] Digilent Spartan 3 Board

[Paul Reed]

Why not just buy a Spartan 3 board?

https://digilentinc.com/Products/Detail.cfm?NavPath=2,400,799&Prod=S3BOARD

Cheers,
Paul


> 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
>>
>>
>>
>
>
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