Spartan 3A Starter Kit

My Spartan 3A starter kit arrived yesterday and today I finally got an opportunity to unpack it. For some reason I expected the FPGA to power up with a default configuration however, the "Done" (green) LED remained off after power-up indicating that the FPGA had not been configured. This was a bit disappointing.

After scrummaging around for a while on the Xilinx website I finally found some configuration files of demos for the starter kit. However, when I tried to program the FPGA or Platform Flash I ended up with the following error:

This had me puzzled for a while and I was a bit worried that I might have a dodgy development board. Not being able to solve the puzzle I finally decided to write my only little program to test the board, a kind of LED on-off test.

For some reason when the "Programming Properties" dialogue appeared in iMPACT, I decided to un-tick the verify column (see below) and Voila! I could finally program the starter kit. I then went back and tested one of the demo programs which I had not had much success with earlier and this worked too.

I am now finally in business and ready to begin developing graphics and DSP algorithms using FPGAs.

This blog will be used to chart my progress.