From: tmpstr on
Hi,
I am having the following sparkfun board which has XC3S500E +
AT45DB161D on it.
http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=8458

The FPGA is working (a LED blink bit file works as expected).
But when i generate a MCS file (as per xapp974.pdf) to program the
config flash, i get various errors.
1) Indirect SPI (with Impact 9.2.4i with USB cable)
Impact does not show the SPI flash as attached device when i add the
bit file with
"Enable programming of the attached SPI device attached to this FPGA"
radio button.
when i again assign the bit file, it says "Device selected does not
support BPI/SPI..."
Does ISE9.2.4i support Indirect SPI for XC3s500e ?

2) Direct SPI (with a header soldered to the Flash chip)
Gives error -> Impact 2595 "device validation terminated"

3) Downloaded and tweaked the S3ESK Picoblaze Serial port programmer
from Xilinx website. This is meant for M25P16 flash on the EDK board.
so in spite of serial port saying "OK" after dumping the mcs file, all
the locations were blank (0xFF).
I guess its the different command set that is causing problem.

4) The "load_prom.sh" in the attached Python script at sparkfun gives
an error of "xilprg" command not found. i could not find any xilprg
(only cblsrv at sourceforge) i guess it supports ony parallel -3
cable.

I am using ISE 9.2.4i with USB prog cable (using libusb-driver) on
Suse11.

Anything wrong with my setup ? or is the SPI prom usage being
discouraged by Xilinx ?

Thanks