[Fpga-synth] Low Cost Avnet Spartan-3A Eval Board News

[Eric Brombaugh]

Scott Gravenhorst wrote:
> I've received my board, downloaded the docs and software and was unable to program the FPGA using the free Avnet software and the USB cable provided.  After visiting the board's forum, I learned that the USB driver fails to function correctly under Windows XP SP3.  
> 
> Due to unrelated problems with my workstation, I decided to reinstall Windows XP and update it all except for SP3.  Now the software works and I can develop designs for the board.
> 
> If you have one of these and are considering SP3 - you might want to hold off until it gets fixed.  There is a post about this in the forum and I think that is the only source of news for this.

A recent posting on the Avnet EVK Google Group:

http://groups.google.com/group/avnet-spartan-3a-eval-kit

suggests that this problem is due to an incompatibility between Avnet's 
Avprog utility and WinXP SP3's USB Serial driver. They indicate that 
they're working to fix this, but suggest a workaround which involves 
using the SP2 version of the driver on an SP3 installation. I've tried 
this on two different machines and it appears to work without issues.

Eric