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If you're looking to learn an HDL on an FPGA, it's probably still cheaper and easier to just buy your own, maybe something like http://store.digilentinc.com/art
by brian-armstrong 10y ago
If you're looking to learn an HDL on an FPGA, it's probably still cheaper and easier to just buy your own, maybe something like http://store.digilentinc.com/arty-board-artix-7-fpga-development-board-for-makers-and-hobbyists/ http://store.digilentinc.com/arty-board-artix-7-fpga-develop... ($99). And for that matter, you can also get started by just using a sim and no FPGA for free
- zw123456 10y agoI agree, the devkit boards are very reasonable now days. I think the part that should be in the cloud is the SDK's. The synthesis is the most computationally expensive part and you could cut compile times down by an order of magnitude if you could run you dev on big iron.
- vvanders 10y agoIf you don't care about the DSP units you can pick up a CPLD kit for ~$20 [1]. [1] http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/lattice-semiconductor-corporation/LCMXO3L-6900C-S-EVN/220-1935-ND/5039065 http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/lattice-semiconduct...
- duskwuff 10y agoYou can also get a "real" -- albeit small -- FPGA from Lattice for $25: http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/lattice-semiconductor-corporation/ICE40HX1K-STICK-EVN/220-2656-ND/4289604 http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/lattice-semiconduct... The Arty is a much more capable board, though.
- thatcat 10y agoWhat do you like about the Arty? I'm considering the parallella board, which is around the same price. https://www.parallella.org/board/ https://www.parallella.org/board/
- duskwuff 10y agoBetween the two I'd recommend the Arty without hesitation. The Parallella is intended as a demonstration board for the Epiphany SOC. The $99 model has no GPIOs or JTAG interface, making it essentially unusable for FPGA development; the higher-end models will still be awkward to work with. The Arty is intended for FPGA development, and is much better suited for it -- built-in JTAG controller, lots of GPIOs on easily accessible connectors, user I/Os, etc.
- j_s 10y agoThanks for the link! Here's the discussion I found from nearly two years go when looking for more about this topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9863475 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9863475
- phamilton 10y agoIs there one that works with Mac? I have an old one in a box that I haven't succeeded in getting running and I don't anything other than a MBP to run on (and I really don't want to do boot camp...)
- sonium 10y agoI have actually been looking into this the past couple days: * The opensource toolchain of icestorm [1] is the only thing running natively on mac. * Most people run the vendor SDK on virtualbox under windows. * I heard also of people using wine/playonmac in rare cases. * I have tried installing the Icecube2 SDK from Lattice virtualized under Linux, because I didn't want to sacrifice the ~30GB discspace for a virtualized Windows. The installation was painful to say the least and I could not get it working on a recent Ubuntu versions because their license manager (Yes, the software is still free) has trouble with the network interface names (expects an eth0 interface). [1] http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/ http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/
- CountSessine 10y agoOk - I guess I'll mention Papilio - basically a Xilinx FPGA on a board. The Spartan 3 version is as cheap as $38 and the Spartan 6 with an HDMI phy is $75. http://papilio.cc http://papilio.cc