Hello,

I have a Spartan 3 Starter board. I used to program it with my parallel 
JTAG cable, but I now do my implementations on a laptop without a 
parallel port. I am in the market for a USB JTAG cable.

Requirements: Xilinx ISE 11.1 running on Fedora 12.

Any suggestions? Will the digilent cable suffice?

Thanks in advance.
-- 
Jason Thibodeau
www.jayt.org

Our Prog3 cable
http://www.enterpoint.co.uk/programming_solutions/prog3.html
is just starting to ship and will do anything a Xilinx USB cable will
do. We are awaiting some more cases before shipping more and you can
but this programmer with out Polmaddie1 CPLD board as a dongle for
about US $140 or a bit less if for academic use.

We are hoping to have the cases in the next couple of weeks.

John Adair
Enterpoint Ltd.

On 4 Mar, 20:24, Jason Thibodeau <jason.p.thibod...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I have a Spartan 3 Starter board. I used to program it with my parallel
> JTAG cable, but I now do my implementations on a laptop without a
> parallel port. I am in the market for a USB JTAG cable.
>
> Requirements: Xilinx ISE 11.1 running on Fedora 12.
>
> Any suggestions? Will the digilent cable suffice?
>
> Thanks in advance.
> --
> Jason Thibodeauwww.jayt.org

The original digilent USB cable only works with
Digilent Adept
software. Somebody had supposedly reverse engineered the protocol for
some digilent boards with that programmer onboard and set it up to
work with an open source programming tool on Linux, but I had
absolutely no success with that when I tried it with the original
nexys board.

The "XUP USB-JTAG Programming Cable" sold by Digilent works like a
charm, but it is only available to academic customers.. and I see the
price has gone up by almost $30 since the time when I ordered mine,
but it's still much cheaper than the official Xilinx cable.

Apparently, you could alternatively use FTDI-chip 2232 as a
replacement for USB-JTAG (there's some convenient info on that here:
http://www.rcs.uncc.edu/wiki/index.php/Lab_Notes#Software_Setup ) and
I think there are some pretty cheap 2232 breakout boards that can be
had.. it won't be faster than the parallel cable, but at least you can
run it on your laptop with no problems.