10 Jan
2003
10 Jan
'03
2:08 p.m.
Chris wrote:
One product that featured highly and looks like the
sort of thing people
might still be using is Xilinx's Xact. A huge number of disks -- looks
like lots of incremental updates. Some are still sealed in
plastic. Anyone want?
XACT is potentially interesting, but unfortunately it requires a dongle.
Reportedly the dongle wasn't very sophisticated, but without a working
system to poke at with a logic analyzer, it would be harder to figure
out how to circumvent it. (Not to mention that it would be a violation
of the US DMCA.)
These days the only reason to use XACT is if you need to support designs
for the oldest Xilinx FPGAs, such as the 2000 and 3000 series. Because
of Moore's law, it is not cost effective to develop new designs with those
parts, as the newer families such as Spartan II are *much* cheaper. And
for current parts under 300K "marketing gates", you can download free
WebPack devlopment software from Xilinx. You can get a nice low cost
development board with the XC2S300E for US $179 from Tony Burch,
http://www.burched.com/
Eric