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
Looking for a USB JTAG cable
Started by ●March 4, 2010
Reply by ●March 6, 20102010-03-06
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
Reply by ●March 7, 20102010-03-07
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.