Programming S3 board

[Martin Harriss]

I have a now discontinued Digilent S3 board that I bought a number of years ago.  I can no longer program it with the supplied cable as I no longer have a computer with a parallel port.  Can I use the HS2 cable to program this board?  If not, are there other recommendations?

Tanks,

Martin

 

[JColvin]

Hi @Martin Harriss,

I have never used any of the Spartan 3 based Digilent devices, but I took a look at the at the User Guide made by Xilinx that is available in the Spartan 3 Resource Center, https://digilent.com/reference/spartan-3/spartan-3, (or at least I presume you are talking about the Spartan 3 as opposed to the Spartan 3E) and can see in Chapter 11 JTAG Programming / Debugging Ports (page 41) specifically in "JTAG Header (J7)" section that this board also uses the same 1x6 100 mil spaced JTAG header (and more importantly the same pinout) that the JTAG HS2 uses, https://digilent.com/reference/programmers/jtag-hs2/reference-manual.

In terms of software compatibility, it is my understanding that the JTAG HS2 has native Xilinx support from ISE 13.2 onwards and Xilinx Plug-in support (plug-in available here) from ISE 12.1 onwards.

Again, I have not specifically tried this combination, but I do not see any technical reason why the JTAG HS2 would not be able to configure the Spartan 3 board.

Thanks,
JColvin

[zygot]

Your question is similar to one that I responded to a while ago: https://forum.digilent.com/topic/4784-s3-starter-board-programmer/

You may not have this board but might find the project, which includes sources, interesting. With luck, maybe eve useful.

[Martin Harriss]

@Jcolvin, Thanks for the reply.  Yes, the board you point to is the one that I am working with.  Like you I've looked through all the docs and it does seem like it would work.  If two of us think so that's probably a good thing so I'll order one up and see how it goes.  I'll report back once I've done some testing.

@zygot, thanks that project looks interesting.  I'll peruse it some more when I have a little more time.

Best, Martin