For Sale Spartan-3E FPGA Starter Kit with Lectures & Lab

cdeamaze · Joined: 17 Aug 2012 Posts: 13

Xilinx Spartan-3E FPGA Starter Kit with Lectures, Labs & Fun Pac-Man
Asking $369.95

Do you have an ambition to become an expert in FPGA IC Designer? If you do, this package (board + lecture + lab) may open the door for your new career!
Despite a slow economy, some fields are thriving and may even be hot. FPGA and Video Games Designer are some good examples. FPGA IC Designers are in high demand and enjoy very high salary.
If your job requires little or no skill for places such as McDonald or Wal-Mart, you may want to consider a career change, read on.
Average salary per year comparison:
FPGA Design Engieer $85000, Video Game Programmer $53000, Doctors $57000, Lawyers $64000
FYI, by contrast, McDonald Order Service/Wal-Mart Checkout $20800 ($10/hr)
Don't settle at the bottom of a salary table. You owe it to yourself to give it a try!
It's not just salary if you found a FPGA job, you also find yourself rewarded with respect. Your relatives will appreciate you. Your neighbors and friends will admire you.
Now you find yourself belong to an elite group called "professional" group - joined by doctors and lawyers. More importantly, your life has a lot of fun and excitements. You begin to wonder: how come I didn't start earlier?

First let's find out what the acronyms stand for.
FPGA: Field-Programmable Gate Array
CPLD: Complex Programmable Logic Device
You will flunk your job interview if you don't know what these acronyms are!

Introducing Xilinx Spartan-3E Starter Kit from Xilinx with

Power supply (AC/DC Adapter)
USB cable for programming
Resource CD
ISE Design Suite 11.1 DVD which includes WebPack 11.1
ISE Foundation™ software evaluation, and the Embedded Development Kit (EDK)

The Spartan 3E Starter Board provides a powerful and highly advanced self-contained development platform for designs targeting the Spartan 3E FPGA from Xilinx. It features a 500K gate Spartan 3E FPGA with a 32 bit RISC processor and DDR interfaces. The board also features a Xilinx Platform Flash, USB and JTAG parallel programming interfaces with numerous FPGA configuration options via the onboard Intel StrataFlash and ST Microelectronics Serial Flash. The board is fully compatible with all versions of the Xilinx ISE tools including the free WebPack. The board ships with a power supply and USB cable for programming so designs can be implemented immediately with no hidden costs. The Spartan 3E Starter board is also compatible with the MicroBlaze Embedded Development Kit (EDK) and PicoBlaze from Xilinx. Spartan-3E differs from Spartan-3 or Spartan-3A in an important way that the board includes CoolRunner II CPLD. So this board is ideal for testing both FPGA and CPLD.

FEATURES
Xilinx XC3S500E FPGA
Xilinx XC2C64A CoolRunner II CPLD
Xilinx XCF04 Platform Flash for storing FPGA configurations
32MB Micron DDR SDRAM
16MB Numonyx StrataFlash
2MB ST Microelectronics Serial Flash
Linear Technologies Power Supplies
Texas Instruments TPS75003 Triple-Supply Power Management IC
SMSC LAN83C185 Ethernet PHY

APPLICATIONS
• Circuit designs from simple logic to complex controllers
• Embedded processor cores, including MicroBlaze and PicoBlaze
• Great for educational programs

Software
download from Xilinx website

Bonus:
This is a package deal you won't find from other sellers at any price as most of them know little about FPGA, much less labs or project!
copy of Xilinx Design Suite 12.4 which include Xilinx Webpack ISE 12.4 DVD (4.5GB)
Xilinx ISE 12.2 and Spartan-3E tutorial with Verilog
Digital Systems Design Overview
Implementation of Digital Systems - PCB, FPGA, ASIC, and SOC
FPGA Basics
Level of Abstraction - Behavioral, RTL, Logic and Layout
6 Lecture modules
Labs including
Full adder
Seven-Segment Display
Logic Analyzer
Adventure Game
Thunderbird (Ford) Turn Signal
Arithemetic and ALUs
Project - Building a Pac-Man Game

Pac-Man (パックマン Pakkuman) is an arcade game developed by Namco and licensed for distribution in the United States by Midway, first released in Japan on May 22, 1980. Immensely popular from its original release to the present day, Pac-Man is considered one of the classics of the medium, virtually synonymous with video games, and an icon of 1980s popular culture. Upon its release, the game—and, subsequently, Pac-Man derivatives—became a social phenomenon that sold a bevy of merchandise and also inspired, among other things, an animated television series and a top-ten hit single.

Pac-Man Play Area

The following table is a summary of enemy characters and nicknames.

Enemy Color Original Puck Man[29] American Pac-Man
Character (Personality) Translation Nickname Translation Alternate
character Alternate
nickname Character (Personality) Nickname
Red Oikake (追いかけ) chaser Akabei (赤ベイ) red guy Urchin Macky Shadow Blinky
Pink Machibuse (待ち伏せ) ambusher Pinky (ピンキー) pink guy Romp Micky Speedy Pinky
Cyan Kimagure (気まぐれ) fickle Aosuke (青助) blue guy Stylist Mucky Bashful Inky
Orange Otoboke (お惚け) stupid Guzuta (愚図た) slow guy Crybaby Mocky Pokey Clyde

Pac-Man Characters

Extra
Second Lab set
Building Pac-Man Simulation Using Spartan-3E Solution
Name and phone number of a recruiter of a major IC company looking for people with RTL design experience

Retail value $395 starter kit only. It is out of stock at Digi-Key. Why pay more and get less (no tutorial, no labs and no fun)?
The lecture/lab level is at the university junior/senior level. If you go to a public college to take a class and a lab, it will probably cost you well over $500, not to mention you also need to apply, pay application fee and gasoline expense.

The lecture material is intended for those who don't have time, energy and money to go to school yet wish to be as current as fresh out of school.
Don't let $370 stop your bright future, buy it now! It is 60% lower than if you pay full retail price and go to a local college to take a class yourself, and about 0.4% of your annual salary if you landed a job!!