zet.aluzina.org

Hi all,
was lurking here for a while, but finally have to ask :

what is the status of the ports to the (xilinx/digilent) spartan 3e 1600 board ?
There were some discussion about it, but is anybody still working on it ?

I think this are nice and cheap boards, so it would be really worth it. And there are enough companies selling a SD-Flash adapter, if it is still missing ...

Cheers

I have a very similar board, yes. The Spartan-3AN Starter Board, which is quite the same. But the problem is the SD-card: it doesn't have... So there is not very much space in the Flash memory for storing a hard drive. In my case there is only 4 Mb. I remember I tried booting Windows with so small hard drive but it was impossible.

But now the plan is to migrate video memory to SDRAM, so the port to this board will be immediate.

If you want a very cheap board, you can consider the new Altera DE0:

http://www.terasic.com.tw/cgi-bin/page/ ... ish&No=364

For only $79 (student option) you have this board, as is very similar to the DE1, Zet will work here without many problems.

The SD-Flash connectors are just few bucks, and a little soldering shouldn't be the problem


Which ? The spartan 3e1600, or the spartan 3a700 ? The later has DDR2 SDRAM ...


I have already enough Xilinx board, no intention on switching to Altera

So, is anybody still working on any spartan 3 ports ?

The Spartan 3AN board that I have has a DDR2 chip, but no SRAM. And right now the VGA framebuffer is using a SRAM chip, so it would be difficult to have the VGA working. But the plan is to migrate the VGA memory to the same system memory, so using the SDRAM (DDR/DDR2 it doesn't matter much).

But you can check out this thread:

viewtopic.php?f=4&t=8&start=10

Caramelgate did the port to a Spartan 3A with DDR2. He added so much HDL code to handle other CPUs and some of it proprietary that I couldn't include it in the release. I'm not sure if he managed to have it the VGA working...

I have a spartan 3a board with sram, so probably I should start that first ...



That's why I started this thread. Just wanted to know, what happened to it. Last email was few month old, and didn't see anything since