Xilinx development software on Linux (was Re: Getting started with programmable logic)

On 8/30/2010 10:33 PM, Eric Smith wrote: I've used Digilent Spartan3E-500 starter board. Great board, lots of connectors, onboard support chips, etc. Note: there are "XA"(DS635) versions of the 3E-500 which are (marketed as targeting) for embedded and automotive applications. Definitely not the same as the DS312 version found on this board! http://www.digilentinc.com/Products/Detail.cfm?Prod=S3EBOARD The only complaint is because there are so many peripherals, it leaves a paltry 40 spare user I/O lines (out of a couple hundred) for other devices. While this has been sufficient for all my projects, I could definitely see this being a limitation. There are other boards which are very pin frugal, like the Sparkfun board, which give you tons of user I/O and mainly the basics covered w/ pre-attached hardware. http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=8458 I like the flexibility of having all these devices bought/soldered/pre-connected/ready to go with the digilent board. Despite having developed a few working projects, I haven't really wrapped my head around matching up project size(aka lines of verilog code, hardware instantiated) with resource consumption. My relatively bare-bones floppy controller consumes something like 6% of the total available slices. I've loaded Xilinx's 32-bit microprocessor core, and loaded some small programs. The entire amiga-on-an-fpga minimig would consume ~65% of this same chip. 500K gates seem more than sufficient for most of my hobby designs. I'm of the more-is-better crowd, though, and so I would always buy the biggest I can afford. Note this is partially because I don't fully understand things --- based from my layman's perspective. There are some other metrics besides just gate count. Things like number of Digital Clock Managers(DCMs), block rams, and so forth. One thing: look for boards with SRAM instead of DDR. While you get more DDR for your money, the SRAM is about 2938402384 times easier to deal with than the DDR. Trust me on this. :) I've worked both with Ubuntu 9/10 and Windows XP/Vista/7 which both work fine with ISE and programming tools. At some point I'd like to try some Altera chips just to compare things, but I have no major complaints about Xilinx. Hope this helps. Keith