OK, first, the admission: I’m an FPGA designer in the aerospace industry. The thing is, in these giant companies there’s always a librarian, or a PCB layout expert, or a signal integrity expert, etc. I can lean on. This is my first project doing it all myself, without corporate support. So, the questions may seem clueless, but I promise I’m very good at what I do.
I’m putting together a PCB with a Spartan 7 ( XAS175-1CSGA225Q ). I have my libraries set up as clones of GitHub, and they APPEAR TO BE properly set up in my project.
I cannot find any reference in the library to the Spartan 7… although I found a thread that makes it sound as if a team was working on it a year ago.
I don’t want to create the model by hand, from scratch… and I really don’t want to have to learn how to do 3d models right now…
I keep a set of KiCad schematic symbol libraries for all the Xilinx devices here. However, the XAS175 isn’t in there and I can’t find any mention of it on the Xilinx site or in their set of pin tables (which I use to generate my libraries). Most Spartan-7 FPGAs have a prefix starting with “XC7S”. I do have a symbol with the part number xc7s15csga225.
If you don’t mind me asking, how do you generate the library from the table? a set of hand-rolled scripts? Or is there a tool available on The Internets somewhere?
I’ll dig around and see how similar they are. Thanks!
I feed these files through a Xilinx-specific preprocessor and then KiPart creates the symbols.
I don’t see any specific pin files for the XA7S automotive family. Maybe they’re pin-compatible with the XC7S FPGAs and just have a larger temperature range and different electrical characteristics.
The more I look at it, the more it seems as if even Xilinx doesn’t work too hard to separate the XA and XC lines in their documentation… so I suspect you may be right that they are the same.
The XA and XS are pin-for-pin compatible. It sounds like the main difference is AEC-Q100 qualification, which is some kind of automotive safety standard.
I also notice that the Q version of the XS chip doesn’t seem to be as available on digikey, it’s a special order, while the Q version of the XA is in stock… might be random chance, but I suspect they simply took the higher-temp XS chips and tested them to an automotive standard.
