KiCAD and Spartan-6 LX9 TQG144

How to design a Spartan-6 PCB?

The Spartan-6 LX9 is available in the hand-soldering-friendly TQG144 package ([UG385] v2.3 at p. 30). Numato designed an open-hardware board around this FPGA/packaging: the Mimas Spartan-6 devel. board [NUM1]. The KiCAD [1] schematics and PCB layout files are found in Numato's SVN repository at [NUM2]. In addition, Numato created a component description file for this packaging: XC6SLX9-2TQG144C.

Numato's Mimas PCB

Other examples of a Spartan-6 PCB design

Andrew Zonenberg has a pretty interesting blog [2], where he used a Spartan-6 mini board. The schematics are available there: [3].

Chris McClelland also made his own Spartan-6 development board as open-hardware there: [4].

Kevin Modzelewski discussed the design of FPGA board here [5], and made a simple breakout board for the Spartan-6: [6].

The Scarab Hardware team designed an open hardware Spartan-6 LX9 board and had a Kickstarter campaign to fund it [7]. Eagle source files can be found there [8].

Jack Gassett designed the PapilioPro board featuring a Spartan-6 LX9 in TQFP-144 package [9]. Schematics can be found there [10] (the schematic routing is quite neat).

How to design a STM32-F4 PCB?

The STM32-F4 was chosen for bit-banging the configuration of the Spartan-6 FPGA. In its smallest packaging (LQFP64), a very compact board can achieved. Frank Zhao designed a bread-board-friendly breakout board for the STM32F405RG [11]. The EAGLE [12] design files can be found at [13].

Frank Zhao's STM32F4Stamp PCB