I love my XEM3001, I’ve been doing FPGA & ASIC’s for 12 years and this is by far the easiest to use proto unit I have ever used.
But, It would really be nice to have your next version have a non-volitile FPGA.
Since the Cypress parts 8051 microcontroller is already retreiving and programming the PLL part, why not do the same for the FPGA image. You would probably need more EEPROM storage, but I’ve put some pretty big FPGA images into serial EEPROMs before.
With a PCB like this I could use it not only as a prototyping platform but an OEM module as well. As it is I would need to layout my own Xilinix board, which would probably be quite different from an XEM3001. It kind of makes a lot of my XEM3001 effort throw away work if I have to do my own PCB later on anyway…
Thanks