Programming USB cable for the spartan 3E starter board

[jmariano]

Hello everyone.


I have on my lab a instrument that I built a couple of years ago using a Spartan 3E Starter Board as digital controller. I'm quite happy with it, the only problem being that I'm using the parallel JTAG cable to make small changes to the system and Pc with LPT ports are becoming rare.

I would like to purchase a USB cable but I'm not sure what model is better. I'm using ISE/EDK 7.1 and reluctant to change. Can anyone help me.

Thanks,
José Mariano

[sbobrowicz]

I won't try to talk you into updating, but Yowza, that's some outdated software...

 

I can say with certainty that all of our JTAG-HS and JTAG-SMT modules will not work with ISE 7.1, and nor will our JTAG-USB. The only cable we sell that would have a shot at working is the XUP-USB-JTAG cable, since that uses Xilinx's programming circuitry. It really all comes down to what cables were supported at the time that 7.1 was released, and I don't have access to that information. Your absolute best bet at a working USB cable would be the Platform Cable USB II, sold by Xilinx. If that doesn't work, I think you're stuck with Parallel ports. Maybe you can track down a company that makes parallel port PCIe cards...

[jmariano]

Hi Sam,

Thanks for your input and sorry for my late reply, I was out of the office for a couple of days.

Let's say that, for the time being, I can use my parallel cable and later I'll upgrade to the last ISE or Vivaldo. In that case, what would be the more suitable cable for me. I just want to do some minor changes on my system and eventually use in the future a dedicated board (FPGA module?)

Regards

JM