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To get started with FPGAs just download one of the free IDEs and have a play. You can buy dev boards for under $100 to get some feedback that what you are doing

by rjsw 13y ago

To get started with FPGAs just download one of the free IDEs and have a play. You can buy dev boards for under $100 to get some feedback that what you are doing really works.

adamnemecek 13y ago
Can you recommend some boards? Whenever I looked into it, I got overwhelmed with all the options and I was not quite sure what to look for.
- JamilD 13y ago
  The Altera DE2 is great to start off with, and it's also heavily discounted for University students.
- coryrc 13y ago
  The Basys 2 is a little old, but it's very simple and easy.
- zhemao 13y ago
  The DE1-SoC board is $199 or $150 with a student discount. http://www.terasic.com.tw/cgi-bin/page/archive.pl?Language=English&CategoryNo=165&No=836 http://www.terasic.com.tw/cgi-bin/page/archive.pl?Language=E... It has an ARM processor on the same chip as the FPGA, which I've found to be incredibly useful. If you don't want the ARM processor, the regular DE1 is somewhat cheaper: $150 or $125 w/ student discount. http://www.terasic.com.tw/cgi-bin/page/archive.pl?Language=English&CategoryNo=165&No=83 http://www.terasic.com.tw/cgi-bin/page/archive.pl?Language=E...
  - kyzyl 13y ago
    Yeah, the SoC boards a nice. So much of what you want to do on an FPGA these days requires the use of a processor anyhow, you might as well have an actual hard block instead of a NIOSII or whatever. We use DE1's at my company as the FPGA analog (pun not intended) of a Arduino Uno, for when we want to do a quick test of some part of a design in hardware, or want to stick the device into something but don't want to tie up a high end unit for something trivial. Be aware that the DE1 has pretty limited resources for somethings. For exmaple, the on-chip memory can get tapped out pretty quickly when doing embedded applications, and it has less I/O and less RAM available off-chip. Also note that the DE1-SoC actually uses a Cyclone V device, whereas the original DE-1 uses a Cyclone II, a nearly discontinued chip that is a big step down.
  - pramalin 13y ago
    Intrigued by FPGA's capabilities, when checking out my classmate's profile http://orangesorter.com/ http://orangesorter.com/, I started looking into some development kits to learn. I found great documentation and economical boards starting at $55 available here: http://www.xess.com/store/fpga-boards/ http://www.xess.com/store/fpga-boards/ BTW, I also found Scala based hardware construction language Chisel very interesting https://chisel.eecs.berkeley.edu/ https://chisel.eecs.berkeley.edu/.
- damian2000 13y ago
  The "Parallella" hybrid board is awesome, but unfortunately has been saturated by orders, probably due to being $99. It contains a Xilinx dual ARM CPU with FPGA plus a custom Epiphany 16-core processor. http://parallella.org/ http://parallella.org/

by rjsw 13y ago

To get started with FPGAs just download one of the free IDEs and have a play. You can buy dev boards for under $100 to get some feedback that what you are doing really works.

adamnemecek 13y ago

Can you recommend some boards? Whenever I looked into it, I got overwhelmed with all the options and I was not quite sure what to look for.

JamilD 13y ago
The Altera DE2 is great to start off with, and it's also heavily discounted for University students.
coryrc 13y ago
The Basys 2 is a little old, but it's very simple and easy.
zhemao 13y ago
The DE1-SoC board is $199 or $150 with a student discount. http://www.terasic.com.tw/cgi-bin/page/archive.pl?Language=English&CategoryNo=165&No=836 http://www.terasic.com.tw/cgi-bin/page/archive.pl?Language=E... It has an ARM processor on the same chip as the FPGA, which I've found to be incredibly useful. If you don't want the ARM processor, the regular DE1 is somewhat cheaper: $150 or $125 w/ student discount. http://www.terasic.com.tw/cgi-bin/page/archive.pl?Language=English&CategoryNo=165&No=83 http://www.terasic.com.tw/cgi-bin/page/archive.pl?Language=E...
- kyzyl 13y ago
  Yeah, the SoC boards a nice. So much of what you want to do on an FPGA these days requires the use of a processor anyhow, you might as well have an actual hard block instead of a NIOSII or whatever. We use DE1's at my company as the FPGA analog (pun not intended) of a Arduino Uno, for when we want to do a quick test of some part of a design in hardware, or want to stick the device into something but don't want to tie up a high end unit for something trivial. Be aware that the DE1 has pretty limited resources for somethings. For exmaple, the on-chip memory can get tapped out pretty quickly when doing embedded applications, and it has less I/O and less RAM available off-chip. Also note that the DE1-SoC actually uses a Cyclone V device, whereas the original DE-1 uses a Cyclone II, a nearly discontinued chip that is a big step down.
- pramalin 13y ago
  Intrigued by FPGA's capabilities, when checking out my classmate's profile http://orangesorter.com/ http://orangesorter.com/, I started looking into some development kits to learn. I found great documentation and economical boards starting at $55 available here: http://www.xess.com/store/fpga-boards/ http://www.xess.com/store/fpga-boards/ BTW, I also found Scala based hardware construction language Chisel very interesting https://chisel.eecs.berkeley.edu/ https://chisel.eecs.berkeley.edu/.
damian2000 13y ago
The "Parallella" hybrid board is awesome, but unfortunately has been saturated by orders, probably due to being $99. It contains a Xilinx dual ARM CPU with FPGA plus a custom Epiphany 16-core processor. http://parallella.org/ http://parallella.org/