Xilinx SPARTAN-3E Starter Kit

LabVIEW FPGA with the Xilinx SPARTAN-3E Starter Kit

The Spartan-3E FPGA Starter Kit is a complete development board solution giving designers instant access to the capabilities of the Spartan-3E family.

Key features of this board are:

• Xilinx Devices:
  • Spartan-3E FPGA
  • CoolRunner-II CPLD
  • Platform Flash
• Clocks: 50 MHz crystal clock oscillator
• Memory:
  • 128 Mbit Parallel Flash
  • 16 Mbit SPI
  • 64 MByte DDR SDRAM
• Connectors and Interfaces:
  • Ethernet 10/100
  • JTAG USB download
  • Two 9-pin RS-232 serial port
  • PS/2- style mouse/keyboard port, rotary encoder with push button
  • Four slide switches
  • Eight individual LED outputs
  • Four momentary-contact push buttons
  • 100-Pin expansion connection ports
  • Three 6-pin expansion connectors
• Display: 16 character - 2 Line LCD

More details about this board are available:

• Official Xilinx webpage of the Spartan-3E Starter Kit
• Some Spartan-3E FPGA Starter Kit Board Design Examples
• Xilinx Spartan 3E Starter Kit FPGA Schematics: Spartan3EStarterKitFPGASchematic.pdf
• Xilinx Spartan 3E Starter Kit FPGA User Guide: Spartan3EStarterKitFPGAUserGuide.pdf

LabVIEW FPGA driver

NI offers a LabVIEW FPGA driver for the Xilinx SPARTAN-3E Starter Kit. This driver is only for educational use and cannot be used on custom FPGA hardware.

More details about the driver are available:

• National Instruments: Using LabVIEW FPGA with the Xilinx SPARTAN-3E XUP Starter Kit
• LabVIEW FPGA driver
• Getting started tutorial about using LabVIEW FPGA together with the Spartan 3E Starter Kit board: Tutorial

-- SvenLoechner - 26 Feb 2009