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Comprehensive list of FPGA development boards
- extantproject 4y agohttps://archive.ph/d95Mm https://archive.ph/d95Mm
- lnsru 4y agoLooks like this is very Xilinx centric list. There are other vendors too. Intel/Altera being the biggest. With Lattice and Microchip probably following. Plus some newcomers I have no experience with.
- jhallenworld 4y agoOne advantage of Altera: parts made on Intel's own fab (so Stratix-10 and Agilex) have reasonable lead times (8-12 weeks). Lattice is great for extreme low power, I've been using their Crosslink-NX 28nm FPGAs recently.
- glowingly 4y agoDo any of the Intel fabbed FPGAs have a free development IDE? Last I checked, it was limited to older Altera-era FPGAs. I know the pricepoint of the Intel fab FPGAs is outside of even my work projects, but I was surprised to see how few FPGA families were supported by Quartus free edition, and was wondering if I missed something obvious?
- jhallenworld 4y agoNope. But you can run Quartus Prime Professional in 30-day eval mode, I just did this for a Xilinx / Altera comparison. [Xilinx is ahead for deep combinatorial logic, I think because of the 8-level carry lookahead in each CLB. Altera was fine for well pipelined code. 1 Xilinx DSP == 2 Altera DSPs. YMMV.].
- aseipp 4y agoThe Cyclone 10 GX line is the most advanced thing you can get for free, but it doesn't seem to have had much popular uptake anywhere (nearly no dev boards, etc.) Intel recently announced their new "Sundance Mesa" series of FPGAs, which are Agilex, and designed as low-end replacements for Cyclone, etc. And they said that they'll be offering Quartus Pro free for Sundance Mesa devices. This really surprised me; generally speaking, in terms of software availability, Xilinx is much more approachable and there are plenty of high-end choices while using Vivado for free. But beyond that: I just run Quartus in eval mode and rm -rf ~/.altera* once every 30 days and reset it. One of these days I'll get a license for my giant Stratix 10 board when my designs are more finished...
- thot_experiment 4y agoAm I missing something about the definition of the word "comprehensive"? How can you call a list comprehensive and ignore Altera/Intel? Last I checked they were the biggest FPGA player in town. I have three devkits within arms reach that aren't on this list.
- Brian_K_White 4y agoAnd Lattice
- harvie 4y agoAnd Gowin. During semiconductor shortage it became one of the last FPGA ICs with 9k LUT that are still in stock in form of very affordable development boards (eg. TANG NANO 9k)...
- xodjmk 4y agoAfter Intel took over Altera, the focus has switched primarily to Data Center processing. Just look at both AMD/Xilinx and Intel/Altera websites and you can see a big difference. If you are a Data Center Engineer than Altera is probably a good match. But AMD/Xilinx has a more diverse focus, specifically video, robotics and AI inference. Altera and Xilinx were about 50/50 competitors for many years and I think that was always healthy competition. Now that they've both been bought out, the future of FPGAs was very tenuous. In my opinion AMD has done a much better job at maintaining and even improving FPGA technology.
- xodjmk 4y agoBut I agree this list in not completely comprehensive without Altera!?! Also, I don't see the Kria boards...
- joelby37 4y agoAs an alternative, here's my list of cheap FPGA development boards: https://joelw.id.au/FPGA/CheapFPGADevelopmentBoards https://joelw.id.au/FPGA/CheapFPGADevelopmentBoards . It covers a bunch of other vendors.
- zerohp 4y agoAside from that. It intentionally does not include any SoM/Carrier card combo even though it seems like everyone is going to that.
- lagrange77 4y agoThat's a nice guide! For the open source section: SymbiFlow is now f4pga. https://f4pga.org/ https://f4pga.org/
- klagermkii 4y agoThis list really limits itself in terms of Xilinx price-to-performance by disallowing anything with a SOM. You can get a combined SOM + Carrier board with https://www.xilinx.com/products/som/kria/kr260-robotics-starter-kit.html https://www.xilinx.com/products/som/kria/kr260-robotics-star... that's going to crush most things there despite being relatively affordable.
- jhallenworld 4y agoAmazing, these are actually in stock: https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/amd-xilinx/SM-K26-XCL2GI/13985243 https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/amd-xilinx/SM-K26... Very good price for Zynq Ultrascale+
- xodjmk 4y agoAgree, the SOM + Carrier board is the only thing that makes sense unless you are doing some large scale production making a million high end boards. The SOM's have suddenly made it possible for small scale or even independent bedroom projects to make use of high-end SoCs! KR260 / KV260 are both great boards.
- rhs-research 4y agoUhh, forgot a few. Only the lowest-cost PCIe FPGA dev boards on the planet https://rhsresearch.com/ https://rhsresearch.com/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B9G97JN2 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B9G97JN2
- skipkey 4y agoSo I have a question. FPGA development really interests me, but I really don’t know where to get started. I’ve done a bit of embedded systems work, mostly with WinCE 5 a decade or so back and some work on video slot machines, but nothing at this level. What would be a good place to start? Most of the things I have looked at seem to assume a slightly higher level of knowledge than I currently have.
- CamperBob2 4y agoIt's almost always best to start with an application. What do you want to do that involves moving a lot of data around while performing some hard realtime processing on it? The answer will tell you if FPGAs are a good fit for the job. Assuming they are, the answer will also give you an initial handhold on the mountain of training and R&D work that you'll need to deal with to make it happen.
- mng2 4y agoThe first thing to note is that while HDL coding may look like programming, it is not (mostly). HDLs are for describing hardware, and it takes some time for this to sink in. There are two sides to the coin: understanding digital design in the abstract, and understanding HDL design patterns to define the desired logic circuits. If you don't have any digital design experience, an oft-recommended course is nand2tetris. I should say though, that that is the bottom-up approach. It is possible these days to string together a bunch of IPs and not write any HDL, depending on what you want to do. But you will probably be stuck if anything at all goes awry, so I don't recommend the top-down approach.
- harvie 4y agoThis is crazy helpful for beginners: https://github.com/FPGAwars/icestudio https://github.com/FPGAwars/icestudio They have drag and drop FPGA programming using visual gates and cores with very well documented examples.
- camkego 4y agoSuper neat, but it seems like this should have been a Github repo that takes pull requests. The Sipeed Tang series seems like it should qualify for this list.
- harvie 4y agoBTW This is very cool: https://github.com/FPGAwars/icestudio https://github.com/FPGAwars/icestudio
- rwmj 4y agoBe nice if they had a list of boards with open source development chains (which would require them to acknowledge that Lattice exists - seems completely missing).
- fpgadeveloper 4y agoYou can add a board to the list now: https://www.fpgadeveloper.com/board-addition/ https://www.fpgadeveloper.com/board-addition/