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Howto program the Avnet / Xilinx Spartan-3A Evaluation Kit from Ubuntu 9.10

The Avnet / Xilinx Spartan-3A Evaluation Kit is a $49 FPGA kit from Avnet, with a XC3S400A Spartan-3A FPGA, and a number of simple peripherals:

• Xilinx XC3S400A-4FTG256C Spartan-3A FPGA
• Four LEDs
• Four CapSense™ switches
• I2C temperature sensor
• Two 6-pin expansion headers
• 20 x 2, 0.1-inch user I/O header
• 32 Mb Spansion® MirrorBit® NOR GL Parallel Flash
• 128 Mb Spansion MirrorBit SPI FL Serial Flash
• USB-UART bridge
• I2C port
• SPI and BPI configuration
• Xilinx JTAG interface
• FPGA configuration via PSoC®

The flash is not updated through a JTAG, but through the USB interface. On Windows the AVprog is used, which can run in Wine and therefore usable on Linux. It is however easier to use the tool called ASTriAEKiPro 1.2.1.