UPDATE May 25, 2017: This is the very last Spartan 3A Starter Kit that I have.  It's open box, but unused except to power it on to make sure it works.  I am going to auction off this last one just to mix things up.

Digilent makes some fantastic FPGA development boards and the Spartan-3A Starter Kit is no exception.  You may be familiar with the Spartan-3E board and are wondering why you haven't heard of this board.  The 3A was targeted more for professional applications such as automotive while the 3E was marketed to academia as part of the Xilinx University Program and is/was available directly from the Digilent website.

Please see my other listings for more FPGA-related items:

Digilent XUP Virtex-II Pro FPGA Dev Board

The Spartan-3A Starter Kit is very similar to the Spartan-3E Starter Kit, but the 3A board has a LOT more I/O pins.  The VGA connector on the 3A Starter Kit, for example, offers 12-bit color (4096 colors - 4 bits each for red, green, and blue) while the VGA output of the 3E Starter Kit only produces 8 colors (1 bit each for RGB).

In addition to the FPGA development board, the Spartan-3A Starter Kit includes a 5V 16W DC power supply, software, documentation, and a USB programming cable.

Features of the Spartan-3A Starter Kit development board include:

• XC3S700A-FG484 FPGA
• DDR2 SDRAM
• VGA video connector (12 bit color)
• PS/2 keyboard/mouse connector
• Ethernet PHY
• 16x2 LCD character display
• Male and female DB9 serial port connectors
• USB programming port
• JTAG header
• 34-pin header providing 17 differential Rx pairs
• 34-pin header providing 17 differential Tx pairs
• 50 MHz system clock
• SMA clock input
• FX2 Expansion port (Hirose 100-pin connector)
• 2x 6-pin Digilent PMod peripheral module connectors
• 4x push buttons
• 4x slide switches
• Rotary encoder