3 ms·

I fear that this article misses out on one of the most important aspects of cheap FPGA boards, which is the software stack. Do not be fooled. There is no freewa

I fear that this article misses out on one of the most important aspects of cheap FPGA boards, which is the software stack. Do not be fooled. There is no freeware, open-source, GNU, LLVM etc software in the FPGA world. You will need to use the manufacturers very own, proprietary, place & route (and often synthesis too) software. For this reason, go with Xilinx or Altera who both offer free versions of their development kits. Also, make sure that the particular part you have is supported by the free kit. Often only the smallest and simplest parts are supported. Form a quick scan of the website, it seems that Lattice-Semi still does not offer free licenses of development tools. Years ago I bought a cheap ($99) Lattice-Semi PCIe/1G FPGA board, this board is still useless as I can't get the software without a $1000 license for the software kits. Although the board was cheap, it's nothing without the software.

mng2 12y ago
Lattice does offer free licenses for the low end. They're certainly not going to give you a free license for PCIe; I'm pretty sure Xilinx and Altera don't either, that's still a premium feature.
- deadgrey19 12y ago
  I haven't used either in the last year or two, so a lot may have changed, although, in the past, many of the low end parts had a built-in (slow) PCIe Gen 1 block, so only wrappers were needed to use it, no licenses. IIRC, this was (one of) the problems with the Lattice board, because with no built in endpoint, you needed to license an expensive "softcore" PCIe block (or write your own...) The same is true of 1/10/40G MAC blocks.
JoachimS 12y ago
Good points. Though I'd say that at least Altera provides good support for most of their devices in the Web Edition. Also Altera and Xilinx (I think) provides a free version of Mentor Graphics simulation tool ModelSim that supports up to moderate size designs.

mng2 12y ago

Lattice does offer free licenses for the low end. They're certainly not going to give you a free license for PCIe; I'm pretty sure Xilinx and Altera don't either, that's still a premium feature.

deadgrey19 12y ago
I haven't used either in the last year or two, so a lot may have changed, although, in the past, many of the low end parts had a built-in (slow) PCIe Gen 1 block, so only wrappers were needed to use it, no licenses. IIRC, this was (one of) the problems with the Lattice board, because with no built in endpoint, you needed to license an expensive "softcore" PCIe block (or write your own...) The same is true of 1/10/40G MAC blocks.

JoachimS 12y ago

Good points. Though I'd say that at least Altera provides good support for most of their devices in the Web Edition. Also Altera and Xilinx (I think) provides a free version of Mentor Graphics simulation tool ModelSim that supports up to moderate size designs.