[time-nuts] FPGA protobards

John Miles jmiles at pop.net
Sat Dec 1 20:00:27 UTC 2007


> I don't know about for Xilinx, but for Altera, a Byteblaster cable is
> pretty easy to make. Low cost varieties exist on eBay too. In fact we
> use a USB Blaster clone in the lab here from http://www.minford.ca
> which is a lot cheaper than the Altera version. Currently I seem to
> be engaged pretty much full-time on some Cyclone-II with NIOS-II
> projects and I prefer to have the USB-Blaster _NOT_ on the board.

My thinking is that programming issues aside, chances are, I'm going to want
the final application to have PC connectivity.  That argues in favor of the
USB-programmable boards like the ones Jean sells.

> I decided to try and play with Xilinx parts early this year, but
> after buying a couple of Digilent boards I found the Xilinx
> tool-chain something of a pig to use. Maybe I am just too familiar
> with the Altera tools, so we sold the Digilent boards on eBay.

The Xilinx-versus-Altera question is settled (for me) by Altera's
product-activation requirement.  They may have a better toolchain than
Xilinx, but it's not 'better' if I can't use it to support the project after
Altera goes out of business, stops offering their free package, or obsoletes
the last compiler version that supports the part I used.  Mandatory
activation of free-as-in-beer toolchain software isn't a policy I'm willing
to support under any conditions.

-- john, KE5FX





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