/technologies/open-source-hardware/b/blog/posts/s7-mini---spartan7-open-source-boardLooks like there is a new Xilinx Spartan7 board on the market! The S7-Mini board has been officially launched at Embedded World 2019, by Trentz Electronic, a German company specialized in the design of high-speed data acquisition, hi...en-USTelligent Community 12https://community.element14.com/technologies/open-source-hardware/b/blog/posts/s7-mini---spartan7-open-source-boardThu, 28 Feb 2019 16:52:07 GMT93d5dcb4-84c2-446f-b2cb-99731719e767:60287e76-1b53-482c-ab14-13f13edceaf4johnbeetem0<p>Very nice little board.&nbsp; I like the way they do the I/Os, with 100 mil holes for a standard perf board and 50 mil holes if you need more I/Os.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>My favorite way to program Xilinx chips is using a US$15 Adafruit FT232H breakout board.&nbsp; That should work with Spartan-7, though I don&#39;t know if Xilinx Vivado supports it &quot;out of the box&quot;.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>As many of you know, I&#39;m a big fan of Free-as-in-Liberty Open-Source Software (FLOSS) for FPGAs so I wouldn&#39;t want to get a Spartan-7 board until FLOSS tools are available.&nbsp; I found a project called <a class="jive-link-external-small" href="https://symbiflow.github.io/" rel="nofollow ugc noopener" target="_blank">SymbiFlow</a> which wants to the &quot;GCC of FPGAs&quot;.&nbsp; SymbiFlow includes <strong>IceStorm</strong> for the Lattice iCE40, which I&#39;ve used for years.&nbsp; There&#39;s also project <strong>X-Ray</strong> for Xilinx 7-Series, but it&#39;s a fairly new project.&nbsp; Anyone have experience with it?</p><img src="https://community.element14.com/aggbug?PostID=6581&AppID=18&AppType=Weblog&ContentType=0" width="1" height="1">