Xilinx announces new Spartan-7 line

[Scrts]

With the sale of the Spartan 6 development boards I have some hope that they will announce Spartan 7 soon

It's coming, should be cheaper than Artix family.

[rstofer]

Nice , they're offering their high level synthesis tools for free for this chip.

Xilinx has offered a WebPack version of their ISE software for years.  Vivado is no different.  But the WebPack version is quite limited in that you don't get access to Xilinx IP and ChipScope won't work, among other things.

The next version up, System (?), comes with access to some amount of IP including the ILA (Internal Logic Analyzer) which is quite handy.  You can get free certificates for this version when you buy certain specific boards such as the Arty or Digilent Basys3 (among many others).  This is a node and chip locked version so you can really only design for the specific chips/boards for which you are licensed (if you want to use IP).

According to the Wiki article, Xilinx spent $200M developing Vivado.  That's a pretty huge investment and I suspect they will amortize it over 10 years or so.  ISE has been around for more than 15 years.  I have been using it for 12! 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xilinx_Vivado

I will be using ISE 14.7 forever.  I have a bunch of Spartan 3 type boards and I don't intend to scrap them just because a new chip is on the market.  I'm starting to come around with Vivado but it's been a struggle.

[KE5FX]

Nice , they're offering their high level synthesis tools for free for this chip.

Xilinx has offered a WebPack version of their ISE software for years.  Vivado is no different.  But the WebPack version is quite limited in that you don't get access to Xilinx IP and ChipScope won't work, among other things.

No, you actually get access to a ton of Xilinx IP with WebPack, including essentially all of the important DSP stuff.  Things like JESD204B cores, Viterbi decoders and whatnot still have to be licensed for $$$.

I believe Microblaze is now free as well, which is a fairly big deal to some users.

I will be using ISE 14.7 forever.  I have a bunch of Spartan 3 type boards and I don't intend to scrap them just because a new chip is on the market.  I'm starting to come around with Vivado but it's been a struggle.

I was pretty annoyed with Vivado at first, and upset at the fact that I had to migrate to it in order to work with the more useful Artix chips.  But the last couple of builds have brought big improvements in stability and (subjectively speaking) overall quality.  At this point I would be even more annoyed if I were forced to go back to ISE.  So don't give up.

The other thing that I'd say is that Spartan3 is only worth sticking with if your time is worth nothing.  (Or, I guess, if you have I/O requirements that 7-series parts can't accommodate.) The newer parts are so much easier to work with it's not even funny, and Vivado is a big part of that.

I'm far from a Xilinx fanboi, but I'm pretty psyched for Spartan7.  It should scratch some prominent itches around here.

[hamster_nz]

I was pretty annoyed with Vivado at first, and upset at the fact that I had to migrate to it in order to work with the more useful Artix chips.  But the last couple of builds have brought big improvements in stability and (subjectively speaking) overall quality. 

Last night I installed Vivado 2016.1 (upgrading from 2015.2), and one great feature for me is some sort of on-the-fly parsing of VHDL, identifying typos in signal names as well as syntax errors.

Yep, Quartus has had this for a while...

[rstofer]

The other thing that I'd say is that Spartan3 is only worth sticking with if your time is worth nothing.  (Or, I guess, if you have I/O requirements that 7-series parts can't accommodate.) The newer parts are so much easier to work with it's not even funny, and Vivado is a big part of that.

I'm 12+ years into retirement, my time is worth absolutely nothing.  I own the Spartan 2 & 3 boards and while I'll eventually scrap the Spartan 2s, I really like the Spartan 3 Starter Board from Digilent.  Mostly I like having 3 ea 50 pin headers that I can use for pretty much whatever I want.  That's a lot of IO lines and the PMOD approach isn't even close.  First example, right out of the gate, I prefer Compact Flash to SD Cards.  They're just plain easier to deal with.  But they do take a lot of IO lines.  That 50 pin header is real handy!  The FX header on the Nexys 2 board is ok but it's just one header.  I also like boards with static RAM or that Micron PSRAM. Again, simple to deal with.

I am a huge fan of Xilinx and Digilent but I can't help noticing that the newer boards are priced beyond my level of interest.  At the most, I might buy the Zybo board ($189) but that's about as far as I can go.  There's no grant money for old guys just messing around.

[obiwanjacobi]

I can remember using beta silicon for the Spartan (1) 

Yeah, you're old! 

[Ice-Tea]

Xilinx has offered a WebPack version of their ISE software for years.  Vivado is no different.  But the WebPack version is quite limited in that you don't get access to Xilinx IP and ChipScope won't work, among other things.

No, you actually get access to a ton of Xilinx IP with WebPack, including essentially all of the important DSP stuff.  Things like JESD204B cores, Viterbi decoders and whatnot still have to be licensed for $$$.

I believe Microblaze is now free as well, which is a fairly big deal to some users.

But no Chipscope. And that sucks.

[hamster_nz]

You might have been talking about ISE. But with the recent Vivado HLx Webpack you do get the virtual logic analyser, as well as the C to HDL tools at zero cost for the lower end parts (most of the smaller zynq, artix & kentix parts)

[Ice-Tea]

AH... Thanks for the info. I guess my age shows too. I worked with an original Stratix ES 

[tggzzz]

I am a huge fan of Xilinx and Digilent but I can't help noticing that the newer boards are priced beyond my level of interest.  At the most, I might buy the Zybo board ($189) but that's about as far as I can go.  There's no grant money for old guys just messing around.

There are cheaper boards than that around, e.g.
https://shop.trenz-electronic.de/en/TE0723-02M-ArduZynq-Arduino-compatible-Xilinx-Zynq-7010-FPGA-module
https://www.parallella.org/
http://www.myirtech.com/list.asp?id=502
and I'm sure there are others.

[rstofer]

I am a huge fan of Xilinx and Digilent but I can't help noticing that the newer boards are priced beyond my level of interest.  At the most, I might buy the Zybo board ($189) but that's about as far as I can go.  There's no grant money for old guys just messing around.

There are cheaper boards than that around, e.g.
https://shop.trenz-electronic.de/en/TE0723-02M-ArduZynq-Arduino-compatible-Xilinx-Zynq-7010-FPGA-module
https://www.parallella.org/
http://www.myirtech.com/list.asp?id=502
and I'm sure there are others.

Yes, there are other boards and http://www.ztex.de/ should be added to the list.  I have one of their 2.01b boards with the debug board attachment and it's pretty neat because the FX USB chip adds fast data transfer between the FPGA and a PC.

I just tend to like the boards with more gadgets.  The Digilent Basys3 is pretty nice because it has 16 toggle switches, 5 buttons, a 4 digit 7 segment display and a VGA jack.  This is just perfect for a small computer of some kind.  The only question is whether the chip has enough resources.  More to follow...

[KE5FX]

Xilinx has offered a WebPack version of their ISE software for years.  Vivado is no different.  But the WebPack version is quite limited in that you don't get access to Xilinx IP and ChipScope won't work, among other things.

No, you actually get access to a ton of Xilinx IP with WebPack, including essentially all of the important DSP stuff.  Things like JESD204B cores, Viterbi decoders and whatnot still have to be licensed for $$$.

I believe Microblaze is now free as well, which is a fairly big deal to some users.

But no Chipscope. And that sucks.

ChipScope = allocate a few pins in the .UCF or .XDC file and hook up a scope.

[tggzzz]

I am a huge fan of Xilinx and Digilent but I can't help noticing that the newer boards are priced beyond my level of interest.  At the most, I might buy the Zybo board ($189) but that's about as far as I can go.  There's no grant money for old guys just messing around.

There are cheaper boards than that around, e.g.
https://shop.trenz-electronic.de/en/TE0723-02M-ArduZynq-Arduino-compatible-Xilinx-Zynq-7010-FPGA-module
https://www.parallella.org/
http://www.myirtech.com/list.asp?id=502
and I'm sure there are others.

Yes, there are other boards and http://www.ztex.de/ should be added to the list.  I have one of their 2.01b boards with the debug board attachment and it's pretty neat because the FX USB chip adds fast data transfer between the FPGA and a PC.

I just tend to like the boards with more gadgets.  The Digilent Basys3 is pretty nice because it has 16 toggle switches, 5 buttons, a 4 digit 7 segment display and a VGA jack.  This is just perfect for a small computer of some kind.  The only question is whether the chip has enough resources.  More to follow...

I'd forgotten ztex, but when I looked at their offerings a few years ago, I liked what I saw.

As for "enough resources", I'm going into "old codger mode" The first computer I used was an 18 bit machine with 39 bit memory, and an architectural maximum of 8K words (i.e. total 319488 bit memory). That was sufficient for commercial operation over decades. Its Algol-60 compiler was famous (being written by Tony Hoare of CSP and quicksort fame), and only occupied 4K words. Algol-60 was aptly described as an improvement on most of its successors

So yes, I'm sure a Spartan-6 does have enough resources

[rstofer]

My project is a code perfect implementation of an IBM 1130 that I first programmed in 1970.  It runs the entire OS including Fortran and the Macro Assembler.  The original was a very cool computer - the first a person could see over.

I started the project on a Spartan 3 Starter Board and have moved it to a Nexys2.  Next I will move it to the Artix or Basys 3 if there are enough cells and it looks like there are.

In addition to the CPU and Compact Flash disk drive, I also have serial ports for the Console Typewriter, Console Keyboard, Printer and Card Reader.  The Plotter is emulated in an mbed with the optimized output fed over TCP to my LaserJet.  It even has the IBM Electronic Circuit Analysis Package (ECAP) that I used in my undergrad studies.

The real machine had only 8k words and mine has the max of 32k words.  The original ran at about 400 kHz with lots of steps per instruction (not to mention an adder that didn't implement carry logic but instead repeatedly applied carry operations until none remained) and mine runs at 50 MHz.

I have puttered with this thing for about 10 years.  Nothing has changed (or improved), just migration from board to board.

I have the original 2 volume Algol 60 books that include the source listings.  I had to write a tiny Algol compiler in grad school ('76) and the only machine I could get at ran time-shared BASIC.  It's hard to write clean code in BASIC!  It would be kind of fun to build a CPU that was more or less optimized for Algol or even Pascal.  I wrote most of an FPGA core to implement Wirth's CDC 6400 Pascal but I got hung up when it came to system calls.  I now know how to do that.

For many years, I have wanted to build BLUE, an elementary 16 bit computer in Caxton C Foster's "Computer Architecture".  The CPU has nothing to recommend it except that it is conceptually simple.  Al Williams made a hyped up version that is over at Open Cores
http://www.drdobbs.com/embedded-systems/the-spartan-blue-cpu-in-verilog/228700593

That Basys3 board will be perfect so that's the next project.

[tggzzz]

The original [IBM1103]was a very cool computer - the first a person could see over.

Well, I'm 5'3" and I could see over a 1959 Elliott 803 It ran at 2kIPS since the logic was all serial.

It would be kind of fun to build a CPU that was more or less optimized for Algol or even Pascal.

See the Burroughs B5000 and successor machines. Ivan Godard is still around and working on a very interesting innovative machine, "The Mill". Details continue to emerge as patents are filed.

[rstofer]

See the Burroughs B5000 and successor machines. Ivan Godard is still around and working on a very interesting innovative machine, "The Mill". Details continue to emerge as patents are filed.

I love stack oriented machines!  I have been playing with ZPU and it's a very minimal design but it is a register rich stack oriented RISC design.  The entire processor takes about 100 lines of code.

It could be fun to build something like a B5000 but I'm not sure if enough documentation survives.  Then too, there's no point in building a processor if there is no canned software to run on it.  Writing a full OS is a rather daunting task.

A lot of the top names in computing were involved with  the Burroughs machines and ALGOL:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_large_systems

[suicidaleggroll]

The Spartan 7 line has been added to the 7-series docs from Xilinx, and it looks like there is a QFP-144 package available, all the way up to the XC7S25:
https://www.xilinx.com/support/documentation/data_sheets/ds180_7Series_Overview.pdf