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Cheap FPGA Development Boards
- ThrowawayR2 6y agoSeems out of date. For example, it links to Digilent's retired Zybo board instead of the current version.
- kqr2 6y agoCurrent version is the Zybo Z7 : https://store.digilentinc.com/zybo-z7-zynq-7000-arm-fpga-soc-development-board/ https://store.digilentinc.com/zybo-z7-zynq-7000-arm-fpga-soc...
- AlbertoGP 6y agoWhen I saw the Parallella (https://parallella.org https://parallella.org) listed there I thought that it must be a very old list, but it turns out that it’s still being sold at least by Digikey. The page is updated though, as can be seen in the edit history with the link at the page footer: https://joelw.id.au/FPGA/CheapFPGADevelopmentBoards?action=diff https://joelw.id.au/FPGA/CheapFPGADevelopmentBoards?action=d... As of this writing, the last update was on 2020-07-20. I’ve sent an e-mail to the author pointing him to this discussion in case other corrections get posted here.
- b1ackb0x 6y agoThere are cheap Virtex-6 and Kintex-7 boards as well ~$100-$150 on Aliexpress.
- duskwuff 6y agoThe gotchas with those are that: 1) The boards are very bare-bones. Most of the I/Os are tied up in high-speed connectors like PCIe or SFPs, which will be very difficult for a beginner to work with. 2) The Virtex/Kintex parts they're using require a paid (or pirated) Xilinx license, and the sheer size of the parts makes compile times even slower than normal.
- lnsru 6y agoBut if you are not beginner some of these boards are really great. Combination of large and fast Kintex-7 FPGA, SO-DIMM, PCIe and Gigabit Ethernet is really cool. For a price of Zybo Z7-10!!! Compile time and tooling is another issue. Naked ZynQ project with ZynQ alone takes few minutes even on decent machine.
- b1ackb0x 6y ago1. I/O isn't that bad, 40-100 GPIOs out, pretty much on par with most Artix-7 boards out there, SFP and PCIe is a plus cause Artix chips have no/slow transceivers and simply can't use them, and well everything aside from tutorials aren't beginner thing on FPGAs 2. License is pain though, you can get a proper demo license for Kintex probably 3. Compile times for barebones projects are few times more for a larger FPGAs, but as you add IPs and stuff they take a few minutes on a fastest computer anyway
- amelius 6y agoSo which company is the most open-source friendly provider of FPGA chips these days?
- 0xcde4c3db 6y agoProbably Lattice, although considering the field that's not saying much. But they at least removed a license term on their software that some of the FOSS toolchain developers complained about.
- b1ackb0x 6y agoFPGA tools allow a lot of customization if you need it, what difference will it make if they are fully opensource? FPGA chip design isn't opensource anyway
- bXVsbGVy 6y agoThe vendors tools are notoriously buggy, don't conform to the HDL standard and lacks support to inference of some functional block (cascade DSPs and FIFOs for example). Some FPGAs features are only available on yearly paid subscription. Also, the license is very restrictive, publishing benchmarking is not allowed, therefore, there is no public information on how to chose a computer to have faster synthesis. Other than solving those issues, an open source framework enable the researches to search for newer place and route algorithms; enables new HDL languages to target the actual hardware instead of using verilog as intermediate language.
- amelius 6y agoWell you can say the same thing about computers. But if computers were as closed as some FPGA offerings, then we wouldn't have had Linux and its ecosystem of open/free tools, for instance.
- bXVsbGVy 6y agoAFAIK, none. Recently Lattice updated their licensing forbidding reverse engineering, but changed their mind once the community complained. Also, a while back, lattice added support to something that was already implemented on the open source tools, but with a different name -- thus, code that worked on open source don't work on the official tool. (I'm not sure if this was "fixed"). The open source tools have been create by hard work of many hackers. If you want to know more, watch this 35C3 talk [1] where MathiasL describes how they reverse engineered the Artix-7 bitstream. Last time I checked, Symbflow [2] only supported Lattices FPGAs and Artix-7 (smallest fpga from Xilinx 7-series). Both are quite small FPGAs. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1Wwa8csFjk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1Wwa8csFjk [2] https://symbiflow.github.io/ https://symbiflow.github.io/
- tyingq 6y agoIf you need 5V compatibility, or large sizes for cheap, search eBay for [altera university]. Since these boards were mandatory for many classes there are pretty easy to find for under $50, and include lots of peripherals, buttons, LEDs, connectors, etc. The cheap ones are old, of course, but still useful.
- metaphor 6y ago> If you need 5V compatibility... The devil in the details is that when 5V-tolerant I/O are naively configured as such, device reliability drops like a rock. You'll likely find this disclosed in the manual fine print. Something to consider when prototyping a design destined for production.
- tyingq 6y agoIn these boards it's not "5V tolerant". It's actual 5V I/O. EPF10K70. They are obsolete, and so the production part doesn't apply. Solely for hobby stuff.
- metaphor 6y agoFair enough. What's the software requirement side look like? Intel's website[1; under Legacy Devices] says Quartus II v9.0 was the latest release that could target FLEX 10K devices. Doesn't look like you can download that release anymore, and liable to run into compatibility issues just installing on modern OSs without a VM. [1] https://fpgasoftware.intel.com/devices/ https://fpgasoftware.intel.com/devices/
- duskwuff 6y agoThis only became an issue a few months ago, and it's really annoying if you need older software. Intel/Altera's site used to let you download older releases; it now redirects to a discontinuation notice.
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- ur-whale 6y agoMy favorite ebay FPGA board vendor is QMTech. Cheap, well made,large choice, decent documentation. [edit]: they also have an aliexpress store.
- CamperBob2 6y agoPutting in a plug for ZTex as well (https://www.ztex.de https://www.ztex.de). Not the cheapest but far from the most expensive, and they publish full schematics. Stefan Z.'s support is first-rate in my experience.
- rudedogg 6y agoWhenever I look for an FPGA board I keep ending up on https://www.crowdsupply.com/tinyfpga/tinyfpga-ex https://www.crowdsupply.com/tinyfpga/tinyfpga-ex. The campaign hasn't been updated in over a year though. Is the project dead, or is there something better out there I should look at?
- neuro_mnem 6y agoCheck out ulx3s [1], it's a quite an impressive open source dev board with lots of features, based on the same ECP5-series FPGA chip. [1] https://www.crowdsupply.com/radiona/ulx3s#details-top https://www.crowdsupply.com/radiona/ulx3s#details-top
- rudedogg 6y agoThanks, that one looks great.
- ColanR 6y agoWhat I never see mentioned are cheap FPGA dev boards that don't come with any peripherals. I guess those aren't worth the pain of adding the peripherals back on?
- contingencies 6y agohttps://www.sparkfun.com/products/14829 https://www.sparkfun.com/products/14829
- jcfrei 6y agoI'm curious: Would it be worthwhile porting the entire stack required for http(s) (tcp/ip, ssl, etc) to an fpga? Would it be faster than running it on a CPU?
- nv-vn 6y agoDisclaimer: not an FPGA expert I think really any task can benefit from being ported to FGPA, but FPGA clocks tend to be slower than CPU clocks and large logic will force you to lower the clock as components become more spread out on the chip (assuming all the logic elements needed even fit on your board). The caveat is that it's expensive to do things in hardware, and some things are already designed very well -- if you need to design a whole CPU from scratch on an FPGA to run your code it'll obviously be slower, but it will also take way too much time to get it anywhere near real world performance per clock. Since TCP/IP and SSL are mostly pretty specialized, the answer is yes. If you're interested, there's some open-source projects that do part of this https://github.com/fpgasystems/fpga-network-stack https://github.com/fpgasystems/fpga-network-stack)
- imtringued 6y agoYou can make anything faster on an FPGA given a sufficiently powerful FPGA. Just because something is possible doesn't mean you should do it.
- ATsch 6y agoThis is what many load balancer or firewall appliances contain
- uticus 6y agoRelated HN thread from 4 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11776190 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11776190
- nkatsaros 6y agoI recommend the Terasic DE10-Nano. Because of the MiSTer (https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Main_MiSTer/wiki https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Main_MiSTer/wiki) project, a cottage industry has formed around addons for this board which makes it a good choice for hobbyists who may want additional peripherals.
- snvzz 6y agoIt's a great board to run miSTer on, but it got no symbiflow open stack support.
- tverbeure 6y agoI can't let a topic like this pass by without mentioning commercial (often obsolete) FPGA-based products that are repurposed as development boards. They usually offer FPGAs with much higher capacity for rock bottom eBay prices. * Pano Logic G1 board: https://github.com/tomverbeure/panologic https://github.com/tomverbeure/panologic * Pano Logic G2 board: https://github.com/tomverbeure/panologic-g2 https://github.com/tomverbeure/panologic-g2 * Colorlight 5A-75B: https://github.com/q3k/chubby75 https://github.com/q3k/chubby75 * Cisco HWIC-3G-CDMA: https://github.com/tomverbeure/cisco-hwic-3g-cdma https://github.com/tomverbeure/cisco-hwic-3g-cdma Playing with these has been a fun hobby of mine and while I have a box full of 'real' development boards, I usually find myself going back to the Cisco board for my personal projects.
- postalrat 6y agoComtech AHA363PCIE0301G might be a future option. They are cheap but I don't think anyone has reverse engineered it yet.
- tverbeure 6y agoI reverse engineered that one partially as well, and somebody has been able to get to an LED blinky. However, it has the issue that Intel recently took down Quartus 11.0, which is the last version that supports these FPGAs.
- ATsch 6y agoUnfortunately nobody seems to be working on foss toolchain for those either.
- andromaton 6y agoIt says 512GB SRAM for the EDGE Artix 7 FPGA Development Board. It should say 512KB SRAM.
- npendleton 6y agohttps://groupgets.com/manufacturers/good-stuff-department/products/orangecrab https://groupgets.com/manufacturers/good-stuff-department/pr... Open source by the talented Greg Davill
- IgorPartola 6y agoI have always been curious about FPGAs and I think I understand the concept, but what could someone provide some use cases for why you might want one (that aren’t calculating SHA-1 hashes)? As someone who understands microcontroller programming and wiring, what cool things could I do with an FPGA that I would have a hard time doing with other hardware?
- rthomas6 6y agoMost things you can do with a custom ASIC chip you can do with an FPGA, except with slower clock speeds. High speed signal processing, massive parallel designs, custom anything pretty much. You can (and often do) even have processors inside the FPGA running software. Some real world applications include a lot of video encoding and processing, cellular stuff, electronic warfare and radar applications, self driving cars, and other high bandwidth and high speed custom data processing. Basically if you need a custom chip but don't need 10 million of them, FPGAs are a good choice.
- IgorPartola 6y agoThanks. So like what do hobbyists use them for? Like why would you buy one to mess around with? And what is electronic warfare?
- seabird 6y agoThere's not much there for hobbyists past toy ISA design and basic digital logic design exercises unless you really stretch the definition of hobbyist. It's a steep increase in learning curve for power that most people will never use. Electronic warfare is most commonly the disabling of enemy radio frequency equipment (radar, communications, targeting, etc).
- IgorPartola 6y agoGot it. So it sounds like this post is more for people looking to build products and choosing which FPGA to base them on.