MicroZed Chronicles: Spartan-6 FPGA Migration Summary

Editor’s Note: This content is republished from the MicroZed Chronicles, with permission from the author.

Over the last few months, we have explored how to migrate from Spartan-6 FPGAs to 7 series and beyond in order to help developers with Spartan-6 availability challenges. While these devices are still constrained, they definitely offer better availability.  

Of course, this requires the migration of the device and also the design of the circuit board and potentially an update of the additional components like DDR memories etc., to address additional obsolesce problems.

I have published two white papers, five blogs, and one webinar to help developers with migration challenges. In this blog, I am going to summarize the resources created.   

• White Paper - Migrating Spartan-6 Designs to 7 Series and Beyond! – This white paper examines how to select the correct device as a migration target and determine the risk associated with the migration depending if the design is RTL, IP centric or based on MicroBlaze. While explaining the architectural differences between the Spartan-6 FPGA and 7 series devices, this white paper also covers the tool change aspects from ISE to Vivado ML.
• White Paper - Migrating Spartan-6 Designs to 7 Series and Beyond! - Hardware Considerations – This white paper examines the hardware design considerations when a board design needs to be updated from Spartan-6 FPGAs to 7 series devices. The hardware design considerations include packaging differences, power sequencing, power estimation, IO planning, updating DDR memories, and clock planning.
• MicroZed Chronicles: Migrating Spartan-6 FPGA to 7 Series FPGAs and Beyond – This blog examines the basic difference between Spartan-6 FPGA and 7 series devices in addition to key differences between the ISE and Vivado ML tool chain.
• MicroZed Chronicles: Selecting the Correct Device when Migrating from Spartan-6 FPGA – This blog examines how to select the most appropriate device on the migration path.
• MicroZed Chronicles: Porting SpaceWire from Spartan-6 FPGA to Spartan-7 FPGA– This blog presents a worked example on the translation of open source SpaceWire IP from a Spartan-6 target to a Spartan-7 target.
• MicroZed Chronicles: MicroBlaze in Spartan-6 FPGA (ISE/EDK) and 7 Series (Vivado ML) – This blog examines how to migrate MicroBlaze designs from an implementation in ISE using PLB interfaces to Vivado ML using AXI interconnects.
• MicroZed Chronicles: Spartan-6 FPGA Q & A – This blog examines the migration of FIR filter design coefficients from ISE to Vivado ML. It outlines the differences between Spartan-6 FPGA I/O and 7 series high range and high-performance I/O banks including IDELAY and ODELAY. The final element examines the migration of the memory control block in Spartan-6 FPGA to the soft-core DDR memory interface in Vivado ML.
• Mastering the Migration Journey from Spartan-6 FPGAs to 7 Series and Beyond – This is an on-demand webinar that explores the challenges of migration and discusses why migration might be necessary and how to select the best device. It covers several architectural comparisons in addition to questions and answers which arose in the original session.  

If you are considering migration from Spartan-6 FPGA, I recommend talking to your Xilinx contact because they have an allocation of 7 series devices to support prototyping of the migration solution.

If you are facing the migration challenge, hopefully the links and resources in this blog will aid in your success!