Spartan-3E starter kit
in [FPGA]
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From: Antti Lukats on 31 Oct 2005 15:23 "Peter Alfke" <peter(a)xilinx.com> schrieb im Newsbeitrag news:1130788825.037813.299300(a)g43g2000cwa.googlegroups.com... > Trying to smoothe the waves. > Spartan3e does NOT use a new, unproven manufacturing technology. That > means there should not be big surprises like they were with the > previous generation. > The sequence of availability will be : 500e, and 100e first, 1600e > then, 250e and 1200 ater that. > > I am looking for the evalboard later today. > Peter > haha - S3e 'GENERAL AVAILABILITY' was mid august 2005 according to Xilinx postings on c.a.f. somehow I feel the people are not witnesssing this general availability ? its few hours til NOV 2005. (or it already is in NZ). but mid august is way past. be it NZ or US westcoast timezone. as of today the s3e 'introduction' looks, well 'a little less disaster' then the s3 introduction. Antti's 3e cents
From: Peter Alfke on 31 Oct 2005 16:08 I do not understand what joy people get out of bitching and moaning. I am not in Marketing, I just try to help with some factual information. If I can get it... Peter Alfke
From: Antti Lukats on 31 Oct 2005 17:16 "Peter Alfke" <peter(a)xilinx.com> schrieb im Newsbeitrag news:1130792932.840675.310370(a)f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com... >I do not understand what joy people get out of bitching and moaning. > I am not in Marketing, I just try to help with some factual > information. > If I can get it... > Peter Alfke > Peter, I just want to have an S3e to play with. thats it. simple as that. I CAN NOT talk about s3e at work- believe me I tried. I will get a weird a look only. I did think that I can not eat my pride to make another attempt (to talki in favor of s3e) but, I did I did eat the pride and did try again to promote S3e - with the same weird look as result. People on the field do not trust to deal with S3e yet. Thats the situation as of today. Sorry. I could ask some friend from some other company to place on order on my behalf, but - that I think is too much troublesome. I can not buy from Xilinx (Xilinx is not selling..) and I am not going to beg either. I do have other toys to play with. I personally DO still think that S3e is the BEST low cost FPGA around - specially the MBT feature, etc. - but it is also likely that I will be looking into alternatives. Peter, its the marketing - Xilinx is big, we all know that, but that is no excuse to bullshit big time. If S3e is available as of today, WHY is it not available from Xilinx online store? Altera has pretty much all the product line in their online shop. I dont have to tell you what is orderable in Xi?inx online store. The fact that s3e is orderable by disties with their usueal 6-8 week delivery (maybe), is not good enough. You know, I am Xilinx user. But as of the S3e delay, I looked 2nd time at Altera Cyclone II, and BIG SURPRISE I found DCI like features there - with no external components. I dont have direct application for this, but I have this on my mind - Cyclone II, orderable now, low cost, supports standard SPI, has on chip termination. If I would have been busy playing with S3e I may not have discovered this feature of Cyclone II. Sorry I have not made full comparison of C-II vs S3e, but chances are C-2 wins. ok, maybe not, the Xilinx SRL16 are really nice, specially when used the way Ken likes it. I hope the missing config readback function of S3 is now being fixed in S3e silicon. Cheapest C-2 available today in online shop is around 12 USD. If I can not buy S3e, I will be buying C-2 ? Could be. For Peter Alfke - I was about to say that I am able to design and manufacture an S3e eval board in 1 WEEK - from design start GO til orders shipped (sure large NRE applies) -, but there is no silicon. hence no eval boards. Xilinx is "targetting" DEC 2005, heavens sake, if there is working silicon of s3e why delay the eval boards til December???? Any delay is lost business, lost money - GOGO, many people are eager to design in S3e, if they get real assurance on availabiliy. The people in the field are no longer buying the marketing bullshit. You can either by the stuff or not. Saying it is available means nothing. Take a look at S3 intro the actual availability was more than a year later from what Xilinx claimed it. A lot of people are looking at 'Xilinx latest' - and they want to get hands dirty with S3e, so why delay? Only explanation I can think of is that there is no silicon working enough to the degree of being allowed to be used in evaluation boards. Really - day before yesterday I spend some time thinking if I should make an s3e eval board - and I figured out that as I am not able to get authorative trustworthy answer on silicon availability it makes no sense to invest extra time at this moment - so I am doing something else instead. Steven Knapp as example hasnt cared to answer my emails. Just plain ignorance. Ok, agreed maybe I am too PITA and thats why he hasnt responded. Antti, Peter relax - I know you are not in the marketing, Maybe one day the marketing will understand that not everything goes. And I dont have much joy in moaning, I do have A LOT OF JOY playing with latest and greates technologies. I really do. And I do play with what I get hands on. Sometimes spending my (or even my families) food money on it. I do not have have any s3e yet, but I have spent some of my private money to obtain some programmable devices lately (not xilinx silicon) and considering buying some more stuff (again not xilinx silicon). hmm,.. actually my last buy was some Xilinx XC4000 on ebay :) - still having ideas to support old FPGAs that are abondoned by their creators. sneak preview: on my harddisk I have a tool I call 'Logic Assembler' it can serve as front end for almost any FPGA/PLD for what the vendor fitter/mapper exists. Tested in silicon with Atmel FPSLIC and Xilinx V4, also works for Xilinx XC4K(bitgen OK no silicon test yet), and pretty much everything. I am looking into adding support for XC2K, XC3K as well but as I have lost my 5 Inch disks with XACT unfortunatly the XC2/3K support is under questionmark :( oh well maybe I can buy it (old XACT) one day on ebay, you never know. --- sorry for long buff.
From: Jim Granville on 31 Oct 2005 18:01 Antti Lukats wrote: <snip> > sneak preview: on my harddisk I have a tool I call 'Logic Assembler' it can > serve as front end for almost any FPGA/PLD for what the vendor fitter/mapper > exists. Hi Antti, Care to post some code examples ? Output format(s) ? -jg
From: Eric Smith on 31 Oct 2005 18:44
"Antti Lukats" <antti(a)openchip.org> writes: > to my surprise Avnet claimed that they have shipped about 400 s3e kits and That's their own XC3S100E board, not the Xilinx starter board with the XC3S500E. |