Electronics > Beginners
The mess of FPGA development
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Arznei:
I am starting to think I am crazy here. Is it just me or is the toolchain situation for FPGAs severely f*ucked up? I confess: I am a total newbie, just want to get my first insights to the FPGA world and pulled a simple FPGA breakout board (miniSpartan3) from my electronics box (well I bought that one a few years ago but life happened and now here I am with a need for it).

So the FPGA is a Xilinx Spartan 3A - I go to the Xilinx website, first impressions:

1) The fancy new design suite doesn't support the older devices like the spartan 3 (and I'm not even sure there's a free version of it)

2) So I go to the "ISE Design Suite", of which the newest version only supports Spartan 6.

3) I have to download version 10 of it which is from 2008.

4) It crashes on start-up, so I have to create some magic registry keys for it to even start

5) It doesn't support the footprint I have, so I need to get a service pack. Which won't install for the first 2 trys but magically work on the third try.

6) Now it somewhat runs but every half an hour or so it just crashes anyways. No way found to circumvent that so far.

I am sorry if this is a bit of a rant. I'm just really frustrated. Like, how do you guys who work on FPGAs for a living even stand this? I get this is a rather old FPGA - but it is still in production, how can there not be an up to date way to program it?

Is there any alternative to this whole mess? Like can I just use an editor of my choice to write up some VHDL and only use the xilinx tools to create the bitstream I need? How would I go about that if possible?
agehall:
No, if you want to use old FPGAs, I think the story is pretty much the same for all the vendors.
0culus:
I recommend looking into the cost-effective boards offered by Digilent. They have Spartan-7, and depending on the features you need on the board, the prices can be quite reasonable.
iMo:
OS you mess with?
NivagSwerdna:
Playing with old devices has severe hazards... try and get current if you can, the modern tools are much better (said by someone playing with a Max7000)
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