Developing older Xilinx FPGA and CPLD XC3S500E

[Cy Drollinger]

I have some old chips and in light of the shortages I continually see despite the 52 week lead time thrown around in the summer of 2020, I would like to develop with them. Specifically, I am talking about Spartan 3E parts and would like to know about setting up a stable toolchain with Win10 or 11. This could include Ubunutu 20.04 on WSL2. Does anyone have a decent recipe to develop these chips. My last development of FPGA was on a custom development board and I utilized a make file calling the necessary tools to create the binary from the ISE tools:

rem Makefile to compile and download a simple VHDL program


rem program.ngc: fpga.vhd
echo run -ifn fpga.vhd -ifmt VHDL -ofn program -p xc3s100e-4-vq100 -opt_mode Speed -opt_level 1 | xst

rem program.ngd: program.ngc fpga.ucf
ngdbuild -p xc3s100e-4-vq100 -uc fpga.ucf program.ngc

rem program.ncd: fpga.ngd
map -detail -pr b program.ngd

rem parout.ncd: program.ncd
par program.ncd parout.ncd program.pcf

rem load_program.bit: parout.ncd
bitgen -g StartUpClk:CClk -g CRC:Enable parout.ncd load_program.bit program.pcf

rem load_program.bin: load_program.bit
promgen -w -p bin -o load_program.bin -u 0 load_program.bit

Thank you for your consideration,

Cy Drollinger

[funkenzupfer]

> I have some old chips and in light of the shortages I continually see despite the 52 week lead time thrown around in the summer of 2020, I would like to develop with them. Specifically, I am talking about Spartan 3E parts and would like to know about setting up a stable toolchain with Win10 or 11. This could include Ubunutu 20.04 on WSL2. Does anyone have a decent recipe to develop these chips. My last development of FPGA was on a custom development board and I utilized a make file calling the necessary tools to create the binary from the ISE tools:

Hallo,
you can download the ISE 14.7 Win10 from Xilinx.
https://www.xilinx.com/support/download/index.html/content/xilinx/en/downloadNav/vivado-design-tools/archive-ise.html

Read the installation manual.
It's a Virtual Machine with Ubuntu as the guest OS and the installed ISE14.7 software package.

Have fun

[Gabor]

The latest version of Xilinx ISE, 14.7, runs on Windows 10 and supports
Spartan 3E. I always used ISE from the Project Navigator GUI, but I
believe you should be able to run your command line builds with it.
--
Gabor