Re: XUPV2P from digilentinc

On Sat, 29 Sep 2007 17:16:30 GMT, John_H <newsgroup@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

johnzulu[at]yahoo.com wrote:
Ouch ouch ouch. I am not willing to fork out that amount for just
testing water... Any other recommendation?

I found the following on the site:

Spartan-3 Starter Board
Spartan 3E Starter Board
Nexys-2

Any opinions on the boards? Pros and cons?

Thanks,
John

I like the digilent Spartan-3E and 3A boards. I own a 3E500 myself, and
a 3E1600 at work. I also have the Spartan-3 PCIe board at work but
never quite got to where I needed it for development.

The biggest question: what do you want to do with them?

If you want memory, for instance, look at the Xilinx Memory Interface
Generator (MIG) for supported starter boards.

- John_H


What do I want to do with them?
Educate myself on FPGA. Hence I like to use the following:
1) Standard JTAG interfaces from Xilinx. I would like to be able to
copy
some of the existing schematics from the protoboard to my designs
and work with it from standard JTAG. For example:
- proprietary USB-JTAG interface on the nexys boards is a no no.
2) A speedy memory interface.
3) A large space for multiple cores....

Essentially the board must have most of the capabilities for the
following work:

1) Plenty of i/o and adequate memory speed. example logic analyzer
2) Enough stuff for video and audio work.
3) DSP work.....

So far this is the kind of work I am aiming for on the board. So the
first project
on the board as exercise would be NTSC output :)

Regards,
John


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