Development tools for Xilinx Spartan 3

For support of an old product, we may need to modify a Xilinx Spartan 3
FPGA. This was originally designed in VHDL with Modelsim Designer and
ISE 9.2, both no longer available. New Vivado versions do not seem to
support Spartan 3.

What are the current options for making changes to a Spartan 3 design?

-- 
Stef

Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable.

On 3/3/2022 9:45 AM, Stef wrote:
> For support of an old product, we may need to modify a Xilinx Spartan 3
> FPGA. This was originally designed in VHDL with Modelsim Designer and
> ISE 9.2, both no longer available. New Vivado versions do not seem to
> support Spartan 3.
> 
> What are the current options for making changes to a Spartan 3 design?
>

I believe you can download ISE 9.2 here:

https://www.xilinx.com/downloadNav/vivado-design-tools/archive-ise.html

but you may be able to use the latest version (14.7) which is also 
there.  These are the free versions.

Charlie

On 2022-03-03 Charlie wrote in comp.arch.fpga:
> On 3/3/2022 9:45 AM, Stef wrote:
>> For support of an old product, we may need to modify a Xilinx Spartan 3
>> FPGA. This was originally designed in VHDL with Modelsim Designer and
>> ISE 9.2, both no longer available. New Vivado versions do not seem to
>> support Spartan 3.
>> 
>> What are the current options for making changes to a Spartan 3 design?
>>
>
> I believe you can download ISE 9.2 here:
>
> https://www.xilinx.com/downloadNav/vivado-design-tools/archive-ise.html
>
> but you may be able to use the latest version (14.7) which is also 
> there.  These are the free versions.

Thanks for that link! We do have a very old ISE 9.2 installation file,
but I was affraid it would not run on newer OS'es and that the
registration was no longer possible. The OS could be solved by using a
VM, but not the registration. Your link shows you can still obtain a
registration ID for 9.2.

Aparantly there even is a 14.7 version for Windows 10 that supports
older Spartan devices. So this may be an option as well.

The original design made use of Modelsim Designer. I think mainly for
the simulator? Do the ISE 9.2 and 14.7 installations include a decent
simulator?
 

-- 
Stef

By doing just a little every day, you can gradually let the task
completely overwhelm you.

On 3/3/2022 6:41 PM, Stef wrote:
> On 2022-03-03 Charlie wrote in comp.arch.fpga:
>> On 3/3/2022 9:45 AM, Stef wrote:
>>> For support of an old product, we may need to modify a Xilinx Spartan 3
>>> FPGA. This was originally designed in VHDL with Modelsim Designer and
>>> ISE 9.2, both no longer available. New Vivado versions do not seem to
>>> support Spartan 3.
>>>
>>> What are the current options for making changes to a Spartan 3 design?
>>>
>>
>> I believe you can download ISE 9.2 here:
>>
>> https://www.xilinx.com/downloadNav/vivado-design-tools/archive-ise.html
>>
>> but you may be able to use the latest version (14.7) which is also
>> there.  These are the free versions.
> 
> Thanks for that link! We do have a very old ISE 9.2 installation file,
> but I was affraid it would not run on newer OS'es and that the
> registration was no longer possible. The OS could be solved by using a
> VM, but not the registration. Your link shows you can still obtain a
> registration ID for 9.2.
> 
> Aparantly there even is a 14.7 version for Windows 10 that supports
> older Spartan devices. So this may be an option as well.

The 14.7 version for Windows 10 uses the 'Windows subsystem for Linux' 
which I believe is a VM built into Windows.  I've never used it.
There is a minor patch that allows the 'regular' 14.7 version to run on 
Windows 10 without the need for the Linux subsystem.

Here's a link to a video that shows how to do that:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XN1Qn60Whl8

> 
> The original design made use of Modelsim Designer. I think mainly for
> the simulator? Do the ISE 9.2 and 14.7 installations include a decent
> simulator?

I've only ever used the simulator (ISim) included with ISE so I'm not 
qualified to say if it is 'decent'.

If you have Modelsim, I believe ISE can use it by setting the 
Project-Design properties in ISE Project Navigator but again I've never 
done that so I can't say how well it works.


Charlie

Am 04.03.22 um 00:41 schrieb Stef:
> On 2022-03-03 Charlie wrote in comp.arch.fpga:
>> On 3/3/2022 9:45 AM, Stef wrote:
>>> For support of an old product, we may need to modify a Xilinx Spartan 3
>>> FPGA. This was originally designed in VHDL with Modelsim Designer and
>>> ISE 9.2, both no longer available. New Vivado versions do not seem to
>>> support Spartan 3.
>>>
>>> What are the current options for making changes to a Spartan 3 design?
>>>
>>
>> I believe you can download ISE 9.2 here:
>>
>> https://www.xilinx.com/downloadNav/vivado-design-tools/archive-ise.html
>>
>> but you may be able to use the latest version (14.7) which is also
>> there.  These are the free versions.

The WIN10 version for 14.7 is just a virtual machine.
Since I run Linux and Windows only in a virtual machine, I
simply continue to use my WIN7 virtual machine with VMware.
VMware is transparent enough to handle the Xilinx download
cable via USB.

A virtual machine in a virtual machine is probably asking for
too much.


> Thanks for that link! We do have a very old ISE 9.2 installation file,
> but I was affraid it would not run on newer OS'es and that the
> registration was no longer possible. The OS could be solved by using a
> VM, but not the registration. Your link shows you can still obtain a
> registration ID for 9.2.
> 
> Aparantly there even is a 14.7 version for Windows 10 that supports
> older Spartan devices. So this may be an option as well.
> 
> The original design made use of Modelsim Designer. I think mainly for
> the simulator? Do the ISE 9.2 and 14.7 installations include a decent
> simulator?

I vaguely recall that 9.2 was somewhat nasty. I evaded to 10.something, 
the latest version that still supported the
original Virtexes. One point was that ISE had some invisible
caches. You could get error messages involving variables that
were no longer part of the project since a week. That could
be invoked by copying the entire project to somewhere else.
It was much safer to just copy the sources and setup the
project completely anew.

I only used Modelsim, Questa sometimes.
And Silos before that.  :-)


Gerhard