Re: which one among the available FPGAs is best for a fresher?
- From: "Jerry Coffin" <jerry.coffin@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 11 Feb 2006 21:46:09 -0800
chaitu11311@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
hi, i am new to this field and studying my under graduate course on
FPGAs. to perform experiments practically i am planning to buy one
chip. so please suggest me which one among the available FPGAs suit me
so that i get in touch with it and also suggest me any softwares
available to interface the same with my pc.
Unless you're planning to do a fair amount of work as a technician, you
probably want a pre-fabbed board rather than just a chip.
Xilinx has a Spartan 3 starter kit for about $100 here:
http://tinyurl.com/7pnsk
Altera has a Max II development kit for about $150 here:
http://tinyurl.com/76k5h
Lattice has a number of development boards around $100-200 available
here:
http://tinyurl.com/9ks2s
When/if you try to enter their online store, they'll ask for a user
name and password -- but if you cancel, it'll let you in (and I haven't
seen a place to sign up to get a user name or password either).
Enterpoint has a couple of nice looking boards available here:
http://www.enterpoint.co.uk/moelbryn/minican.html
Unfortunately, while the prices are pretty nice, shipping to the US is
a bit on the steep side.
Avnet has a fairly extensive list of development boards available here:
http://tinyurl.com/43ozs
FPGA4FUN.com has a number of (mostly Altera-based) boards available at
quite reasoanble prices here:
http://www.knjn.com/ShopBoards.html
That's far from an exhaustive list, but it's probably more than enough
to overwhelm you for now! :-)
One final note: keep in mind that you'll have to develop controllers
for most of what's on the board to actually be able to use them. The
connectors for PCI, Ethernet, USB, etc., each need to be driven
correctly to do anything useful. It's pretty easy to develop and/or
find cores for things like serial ports, but quite a bit more difficult
(and/or expensive) to deal with PCI (for one example). Likewise with
things like on-board memory -- just for example, a big DDR2 SDRAM may
sound sexy, but be prepared for a fair amount of work before you can
get data into or out of it dependably.
I haven't played with anywhere close to all of these, but of the ones I
have played with, the Spartan 3 starter kit probably has the most
accessible peripherals. Pretty much when you decide to do something
that needs to use the memory, serial port, LEDs, etc., you just do it
and it works. You could download and use any of several UART cores for
the serial port (for example) but I've never bothered -- I suspect it's
probably close to as much work to figure out how to use somebody else's
UART as it is to write at least a simple one of your own (though
somebody else's might be more efficient).
--
Later,
Jerry.
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
.
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