What FPGAs (Field-Programmable Gate Arrays) can one buy to experiment with at home? [closed]

Answer 1

As to your question about what an FPGA is, I think the best way to think of it if you are already familiar with microcontrollers (and their normal programming scheme with sequential ordering of processing) is to think of a microcontroller as being told what to "do" and FPGAs as being told what to "be." I think this is the simplest way to view it :P FPGAs are programmed differently. You need to have a full knowledge of the circuit which you want to design, the inputs, outputs, and you will need to spend a lot of time considering the clocking, as clock skew and other issues can easily arise when dealing with more complex circuits in FPGAs! I learned about FPGAs first using a Spartan3E. Have fun! :)

Answer 2

I have little experience with other brands, but I am very happy with the Altera DE2 "*D*evelopment and *E*ducation Board". It is an ideal starting point if you have not played around with FPGAs before.

It includes half a dozen different types of memories (SDRAM, SRAM, Flash, SD cards), 7-segment displays, lots of buttons and switches and more I/O than you can shake a stick at. Want to play with IR? Ethernet? VGA? USB? Audio? All these are the sorts of things that students and novices like. :-)

The same applies to the DE2-70 and other big-brother cards to this one.

Answer 3

An interesting open-source piece of hardware is Armadeus.

It combines a Xilinx FPGA (Spartan 6A) with with an ARM SoC (Freescale i.MX51), and that thing can run Linux with custom peripherals implemented on the Spartan!

(BTW, the iMX51 SoC has an FPU as well an is clocked at 800 MHz.)

Answer 4

This depends on the kind of experiments you want to run. I recommend the Virtex 2 boards if you're doing small logic. If you're doing something complex target for Virtex 5, especially if you need an on-ship processor for serial calculations. I think it comes with PowerPC. If you can provide more detail for your experiment I can help you chose a better FPGA.

An ALU is Arithmetic Logic Unit were you do all the "math" stuff: addition, shifts, multiplication, etc.

You program them using HDL software, either VHDL or Verilog. The latter is more C-like. I prefer the first. I have worked with it a long time. You can download Modelsim student edition and experiment with it.

Its not easy learning FPGA so take some time to learn how to program HDL first.

Answer 5

I find this an interresting question and it continues to be. The FPGA's world is also on the constant move and due to this new boards keep arising. If it is still an open question, I would suggest ZYBO from Digilent or DE1-SOC from Terrasic. Which to chose is highly dependant on ones take on Xilinx vs. Altera (a completely different discussion). The good about the two is that they have both FPGA and ARM processor for learning both FPGA design, and embedded OS development.

Answer 6

This board has several interesting example firmwares to choose from. (The AGA Amiga platform is not in that list, but an Amiga compatible firmware is also available for it.)