Anyone using Xilinx XC2k XC3k XC4k FPGAs?

[peter-h]

I used to do FPGA design consultancy many years ago, finally getting out of it in 1996. Also did some ASIC design, prototyped on XC3090 FPGAs.

I still have the tools, comprising of Viewlogic/LCA v4 and XACT 5. In those days they were dongled but some Russian guy did patches so the tools will run standalone, on a DOS 6.2 machine. They may also run in a VM but VL4 works best with an ATI 8514-emulating video card which may not work in a VM. I also have one of these video cards. That toolset cost about $20k back then but is worthless now.

I also have the user manuals scanned to PDFs. I think all my designs are in there too.

So if anyone is interested, PM me.

This stuff would be handy for opening an old FPGA based product, to do a mod, etc. I know the XC3064 and XC3090 devices were still manufactured 10 years ago, and the 4k devices probably later. I never did any work with the XC2k devices.

I did some fun work in those days, e.g. pulse generators for some flight sims, a funky interface card for a Hitachi PLC protocol which used a high power manchester coded physical layer for extremely severe EM environments (64 bit packets) with an RS232 interface on the other end, some crypto stuff... Gave up FPGAs because they tools kept changing, and frankly most of the jobs could now be done with a 168MHz ARM32 CPU. Xilinx did not maintain backward compatibility so old designs could not be imported; the sales guy said "you have to break some eggs to make an omelette" and that was it