USB PROG/UART schematic request

[adelcastillo@spacevector.c]

To Whom it may concern:

 

  Can you please provide the USB PROG/UART schematic (page 10 of documented schematics) for the Arty A7 board?

Thanks
Art

[zygot]

@DmDerevI happen to agree with your viewpoint. If a company thinks that something can generate revenue, by exploiting information that is not well known, they are likely to ignore the cost of "goodwill' that is lost when implementing controls that preserve that exploit. There's nothing here that can be patented. Nothing particularly clever or unique.

Virtually all FPGA development boards use a USB bridge device for configuration. All FPGA vendor tools have a limited set of USB bridge device properties that they will play with. I just don't see the long term value in trying to license connectivity schemes. But this is a decision for board vendors. I suppose that the distaste for having someone, potentially a competitor, copy your hardware designs over-rides common sense.

There are board vendors that don't publish any schematics making even using the LEDs an adventure. This is also their decision. The perceived value of what a vendor might consider "proprietary" and hidden from users can't be measured against the unknown lost revenue that is lost when potential customers choose not to buy their products due to lack of support.

A problem with bad ideas when they don't get challenged is that they tend to be repeated. So a proprietary FPGA configuration scheme might be a bad idea; and that leads to selling ADC ZMODs with black boxes in the schematics. I certainly will never buy a converter product missing vital information about how it functions.

Edited October 18, 2022 by zygot

[asmi]

On 10/17/2022 at 11:49 PM, DmDerev said:

P.S. The "secret" is explained in detail by Xilinx in Appendix E of User Guide UG908: 

https://docs.xilinx.com/r/en-US/ug908-vivado-programming-debugging/JTAG-Cables-and-Devices-Supported-by-hw_server

This section only appeared in v2022.1 of this document, previously this was not available to the general public.

I wonder if Digilent will drop prices on their overpriced programmers now that they no longer hold monopoly for this stuff, and anybody can impement a circuit and make it work with Xilinx tools... Equally, now it makes even less sense for them to hide this schematics page as anybody can find a reference implementation of such programmer.

Edited October 24, 2022 by asmi