What to do with those old XC3S1200E chips (o;

[james_s]

IIRC what it actually does is load a bitfile into the FPGA that turns it into a programming device for the configuration flash chip. It's been a while since I've worked with Xilinx parts but I do know that you can load the bitstream directly (volatile) or program the flash (nonvolatile) with the same JTAG connection.

[SiliconWizard]

IIRC what it actually does is load a bitfile into the FPGA that turns it into a programming device for the configuration flash chip.

Yes that's what it does.
And if you want to do it yourself - which is what I did for some project with a Spartan-6 - you're in luck: https://github.com/quartiq/bscan_spi_bitstreams

[laugensalm]

You'll need a Xilinx platform USB cable, the Chinese clones work fine.

Using xc3sprog or PapilioProg etc., any FT2232 or other supported cable will do and is a bit faster than Impact and the corresponding Diligentware.
If I didn't already migrate to Spartan6 many years ago, those 1200E would be neat for some legacy applications where the Spartan3 just perform fine.

[mikeselectricstuff]

They;re all out of stok at Digikey so may be worth reselling

[davorin]

Okay...my DLC10 clone arrived finally....works fine in Vivado 2021.2....

Is there a trick to use it also on ISE 14.7? Impact just tells me that no cable was found...
And gave xc3sprog a go...but seems it can only be built for RPi as it wants wiringPi.h.

[MadTux]

BTW, steps to get that Wind/U stuff for floorplaner.... working for ISE 10.1, 14.3 and 14.7 on current Arch64:

Code: [Select]

sudo pacman -S openmotif libstdc++5 xorg-fonts-100dpi xorg-fonts-75dpi net-tools xorg-xlsfonts rpcbind

/opt/Xilinx/14.7/ISE_DS/ISE/bin/lin64/_fpga_editor: error while loading shared libraries: libXm.so.3:
sudo pacman -S openmotif
cd /usr/lib
sudo ln -s libXm.so.4 libXm.so.3

/opt/Xilinx/14.7/ISE_DS/ISE/bin/lin64/_fpga_editor: error while loading shared libraries: libstdc++.so.5:
sudo pacman -S libstdc++5

Wind/U error:
sudo pacman -S xorg-fonts-100dpi xorg-fonts-75dpi

sudo pacman -S net-tools
sudo pacman -S xorg-xlsfonts
sudo pacman -S rpcbind

xlsfonts
Create file "xilinx-font.txt" with xlsfonts output accordingly:
*SystemFontSpec:-misc-fixed-medium-r-semicondensed--0-0-75-75-c-0-iso8859-1
*SystemFont:-misc-fixed-medium-r-semicondensed--13-100-100-100-c-60-iso8859-1

sudo systemctl enable rpcbind

Before every ISE start, execute:
xrdb -merge xilinx-font.txt

Perhaps that helps someone, took me quite a while to figure everything out....