I’ve had some good fun with FPGAs over the past month and I was curious to see what was inside the JTAG programming box; thus, the Ware for March 2011 is the Xilinx platform cable USB II. Here’s a full image without the part number redactions. The winner of last month’s competition is Fiach Antaw, please email me to claim your prize.
Incidentally, the Xilinx ISE tools have come a loooong way since I started using them back in the mid-90’s while I was an undergrad at MIT (and fwiw, Xilinx’s university sponsorship program worked on me hook, line and sinker: to this day I remember their donations of parts & tools, and I still exclusively use Xilinx FPGAs). The most recent addition to the design tools suite is Chipscope, which enables you to instantiate a virtual logic analyzer inside the FPGA to analyze your design in-situ. It’s very powerful and makes short work of debugging some difficult problems, particularly ones involving timing conditions that are hard to replicate in simulation.