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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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  • I might be a little late in my feedback since nowadays I am a little busyGrin. But I would like to say that overall it was a really good experience in working on the Spartan 7 FPGA board. This was the first time I worked on a FPGA board. I would just like to point out some things that I as a beginner struggled for:
    1. I found it very hard to understand the online documentation and tutorials available. It was only because of the road test blogs posted on E14, I was able to start working on the board.
    2. I couldn't find much material on Vivado HLS (that I could understand easily).

    3. I think there should be some short video tutorials on basic projects. After going through such basic tutorials, understanding the complete documentation becomes easier.
    4. It was taking around an hour to synthesize the simplest designs on the board consisting of the MicroBlaze IP. But around a week before the deadline, it became suddenly faster, it started synthesizing in around 15 minutes. Now, I don't know what happened back then, had I changed some setting by mistake, some driver issue or it was something else but that wasted a lot of time.

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  • I might be a little late in my feedback since nowadays I am a little busyGrin. But I would like to say that overall it was a really good experience in working on the Spartan 7 FPGA board. This was the first time I worked on a FPGA board. I would just like to point out some things that I as a beginner struggled for:
    1. I found it very hard to understand the online documentation and tutorials available. It was only because of the road test blogs posted on E14, I was able to start working on the board.
    2. I couldn't find much material on Vivado HLS (that I could understand easily).

    3. I think there should be some short video tutorials on basic projects. After going through such basic tutorials, understanding the complete documentation becomes easier.
    4. It was taking around an hour to synthesize the simplest designs on the board consisting of the MicroBlaze IP. But around a week before the deadline, it became suddenly faster, it started synthesizing in around 15 minutes. Now, I don't know what happened back then, had I changed some setting by mistake, some driver issue or it was something else but that wasted a lot of time.

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