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Follow Up to the 7 Ways to Leave Your Spartan-6 Program: How Well Do You Like Working with the Spartan-7 FPGA?

rscasny

element14's 7 Ways to Leave Your Spartan-6 Program concluded several months ago. Twenty-five members participated in the program. Overall, they produced an incredible number of blogs. It was interesting to read all the comments, too. As an observer, I could see how the particpants worked together and helped each other.

One of the key reasons for launching this program was to get our members familiar with using the Spartan-7 FPGA since the Spartan-6 is at its EOL. The sponsor came back to me a few weeks ago and was seeking some overall feedback of element14 members' experience with the Spartan-7. What do you like or not, issues, documentation, etc.

We want to get your pulse on the Spartan-7 FPGA from a user or developers' point of view.

So, if you either participated in the 7 Ways to Leave Your Spartan-6 program or are a user of the Spartan-7 FPGA, I'd appreciate you taking some times to offer your thoughts in the comments section below. Thank you.

Randall
--element14 Team

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  • Before enrolling in the "7 Ways to Leave Your Spartan-6 Program", I had few years of experience working (on an off) with Xilinx's Zynq-7000 FPGAs. For those unfamiliar with Zynq series, these FPGAs have built-in hard processors in addition to the usual configurable FPGA fabric. With regards to working with Spartan-7, following are some points worth mentioning, in no particular order:
    - I am not a core HDL person, so I've always found Vivado/Vitis/HLS very useful. This thing continued with the Spartan-7 as I was already quite familiar with the toolchain. At work I have had to deal with some Spartan (3/6) designs in the past few years and going back to the decade old ISE has always been a turn-off. Not the case when using Spartan-7. And Vivado/Vitis gets frequent updates that you can use without buying licenses. Big plus for me.
    - A lot of the openly available IPs, for example from Digilent, are compiled for Zynq-7000. After going through the IP source codes (HDMI), I found that they actually didn't use anything specific to the Zynq-7000 and I was able to recompile them for Spartan-7 using the IP integrator and use them in my designs. However, I do wish the original authors (Digilent in this case) had compiled them for Spartan-7 to begin with. It would save people some time.
    - The main issue I encountered with the Spartan-7 had to do with the use of Microblaze. It took me a few days and some asking around on the element14 forum to get the very basic design to work. The technical reasons aside, I do think that the process should have been much smoother. If I want to add a Microblaze to my design, Vivado should help do those things correctly without me having to make connections in particular ways manually. A user should be able to do this much without reading the documentation. Maybe I am just spoilt by how easy it is to run a basic processor design with the Zynq series.
    - I like the idea of being able to use an ARM processor within the device. However, the major turn-off for me has always been the fact that I cannot use Vitis (SDK) to write the code for it and have to install yet another software for it. It would be nicer if I can just use the same familiar Vitis SDK to program the soft-ARM cores as well.
    - The disk space consumption of the Xilinx tools has always been a pain point. It's more than any other software that I use by a good margin. I hope this gets improved in future.

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  • Before enrolling in the "7 Ways to Leave Your Spartan-6 Program", I had few years of experience working (on an off) with Xilinx's Zynq-7000 FPGAs. For those unfamiliar with Zynq series, these FPGAs have built-in hard processors in addition to the usual configurable FPGA fabric. With regards to working with Spartan-7, following are some points worth mentioning, in no particular order:
    - I am not a core HDL person, so I've always found Vivado/Vitis/HLS very useful. This thing continued with the Spartan-7 as I was already quite familiar with the toolchain. At work I have had to deal with some Spartan (3/6) designs in the past few years and going back to the decade old ISE has always been a turn-off. Not the case when using Spartan-7. And Vivado/Vitis gets frequent updates that you can use without buying licenses. Big plus for me.
    - A lot of the openly available IPs, for example from Digilent, are compiled for Zynq-7000. After going through the IP source codes (HDMI), I found that they actually didn't use anything specific to the Zynq-7000 and I was able to recompile them for Spartan-7 using the IP integrator and use them in my designs. However, I do wish the original authors (Digilent in this case) had compiled them for Spartan-7 to begin with. It would save people some time.
    - The main issue I encountered with the Spartan-7 had to do with the use of Microblaze. It took me a few days and some asking around on the element14 forum to get the very basic design to work. The technical reasons aside, I do think that the process should have been much smoother. If I want to add a Microblaze to my design, Vivado should help do those things correctly without me having to make connections in particular ways manually. A user should be able to do this much without reading the documentation. Maybe I am just spoilt by how easy it is to run a basic processor design with the Zynq series.
    - I like the idea of being able to use an ARM processor within the device. However, the major turn-off for me has always been the fact that I cannot use Vitis (SDK) to write the code for it and have to install yet another software for it. It would be nicer if I can just use the same familiar Vitis SDK to program the soft-ARM cores as well.
    - The disk space consumption of the Xilinx tools has always been a pain point. It's more than any other software that I use by a good margin. I hope this gets improved in future.

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