April 26, 2022
FPGA - Spartan 3E board - Overview
The box is labeled "Digilent Spartan 3E Starter".
The big deal is the Spartan-3E FPGA which has 500,000 gates
and over 10,000 logic cells.
In addition, you get:
- Three 6 pin PMOD ports (4 bits each)
- 4 Mbit "platform" flash
- 64 Mbyte ddr SDRAM
- 16 Mbyte NOR flash (Intel)
- 16 Mbyte SPI serial flash (ST micro)
- 10/100 ethernet (requires Ethernet MAC in the FPGA)
- 50 Mhz oscillator
- 2 line 16 character LCD
- PS/2 port
- VGA port
- Two 9 pin serial ports
- 8 pin socket for auxiliary oscillator
- 4 slide switches
- 4 buttons
- 8 LED
- encoder knob
- 4 output SPI dac
- 2 input SPI adc
- Hirose FX2 expansion connector
FX2 connector
What the heck is this? It is a 100 pin expansion connector. Read more here:
Digilent offers a myriad of things that plug into the PMOD connectors.
As just one of many, here is a handy wire terminal adapter:
RISC
The brochure mentions a 32 bit RISC processor, which I suppose is one IP block that
could be configured in the FPGA. Will this be available via ISE Webpack?
I sort of doubt it, but haven't really checked yet.
Big chips on board
- Xilinx XC3S500E (the spartan device)
- Xilinx XC2C256 ("CoolRunner-II CPLD with 256 macrocells)
- Xilinx XCF04S (FPGA configuration flash)
- Cy7C68013A (USB 2.0 microcontroller)
- SMSC LAN83C185 (10/100 ethernet transciever, 3.3 volt)
- Intel JS28F128 (256 Mbit flash)
- ST 25P16V6G (16 Mbit SPI flash)
- Micron 46V32M16 (DDR ram, 8 meg by 16 by 4 banks)
Feedback? Questions?
Drop me a line!
Tom's Computer Info / tom@mmto.org