I had a lot of interest in my giveaway for the Digilent CMOD S7 board, so I am offering another giveaway for 2 members who are interested in experimenting with a Spartan-6 FPGA. Let me tell you about the board first. 
It's called the Cmod S6 -- a Breadboardable Spartan-6 FPGA Module.
It's small, featuring a 48-pin DIP form factor board built around a Xilinx Spartan 6 LX4 FPGA.
The board also includes a programming ROM, clock source, USB programming and data transfer circuit, power supplies, and basic I/O devices. There are 46 FPGA I/O signals that are routed to 100-mil-spaced through-hole pins, making the Cmod S6 well suited for use with solderless breadboards. At just .7” by 2.6” inches, it can also be loaded in a standard socket and used in embedded systems.
Key features include:
Spartan 6 XC6SLX4-2CPG196 FPGA Features include:
- 600 slices (each with 4 LUTs and eight flip-flops);
- 8 DSP slices;
- 216Kbits of block RAM;
- 2 CMTs (4 DCMs and 2 PLLs).
Board features include:
16Mbyte Spansion Quad SPI Flash for storing FPGA configurations and/or user data;
- 46 FPGA GPIO signals brought to DIP pins;
- Two on-board clock sources;
- 4 user LEDs and 2 user buttons;
- On-board Adept USB2 port for configuration, test and communications interfaces.
Here's the datasheet:
What Do You Need to Do To Get These Boards?
I'm running these as board project giveaways instead of RoadTests to give members interested in experimenting with the Spartan-6 but may not feel they have the background to compete in a full roadtest. So like the last giveaway if you are would-be roadtester who would like to build up his/her portfolio of things you have done on the community or you want to do something to learn about the Spartan-6 FPGA and get some time to improve your skills with the associated design tool, this could very well be for you. (A side note: I may very well decide to roadtest this in the future. But for now, I want to do a giveaway project.)
So, tell me what you want to achieve with this little board? What's your goal in learning? What would you like to experiment with? Or what kind of project do you think you would build. I'll choose the 2 most interesting ideas and send you the board.
Randall Scasny
RaodTest Program Manager
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