Reverse Engineer Spartan-6 Board

Hi

I'm exploring the feasibility of reverse engineering an existing FPGA board. This has an xc6slx150, 2*512MB RAM, USB Ethernet etc., and the idea is that if it could be reverse engineered it would be a very cheap fpga platform.

I wondered if anyone had any idea how this could be done, and how much effort it would be?

I've considered manual methods - e.g. stripping a board and tracing the connections, this would work, but I dismissed it as way too much effort. Quite a lot of clues can be gathered from examining the circuit board, and some judicious probing, but not enough information to support development :-( I think the only way it could be cost effectively done is via software, but I am not familiar enough with the tools to know if this is feasible, or to estimate the effort involved.

The other problem is writing code to drive the IC's on the board - but I'm guessing that standard modules would be available for most of the common parts these days?

Comments welcome.

Hi tja,

If gerbers files are not available then it would be a difficult job if you are planning to do it yourself. In my opinion doing your own board will be more easier. You may find reference design for spartan-6 evaluation kit from xilinx. Xilinx provides schematics, gerbers files, bill of material and even pcb design files for their evaluation boards. Xilinx also provides code samples for the devices used on their boards.
You may also post your questions to xilinx user forum in case if you get stuck into any design issue. Therefore, in my opinion there isnt much to worry about if you decide to do your own board around spartan-6. the device is well supported by xilinx.

regards

tja said:

Hi
The other problem is writing code to drive the IC's on the board - but I'm guessing that standard modules would be available for most of the common parts these days?

Comments welcome.

Click to expand...

It will depend on the parts. If you cannot find a controller on opencores.org (and a lot of them here are incomplete) you will have toy write your own controller or buy one from a 3rd party.

It's possible - have a look at this thread, where someone reverse engineered the schematic for a Virtex-5 board: https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/...is-primesense-devkit-better-known-as-kinect)/

With a Spartan-6, if they're using DDR memory with the MIG core there are only a few possible pin placements, which will cut down on the amount of effort. The ease of tracing everything else might depend on how accessible pins or breakout vias are, etc. It's probably not worth it unless you can get loads of the boards and they're very cheap, but it would be an interesting project regardless.

Thanks - I have asked on that thread what techniques he used, we'll see what he comes back with.

Yes, it does have DDR2 memory, and the boards should be plentiful and very cheap, but the more I get into the project, the more difficult it appears!

Personally I wouldn't bother reverse engineering a spartan-6 board. A big virtex-6 board might be worth the effort, but spartan-6 is cheap enough. In any event, it will be a great learning experience so if that is 80% or more of your goal then go for it!