Sounds good! Here are a couple of links for LCMXO3L-6900C-S-EVN:
Digikey
Mouser

I also forgot to mention that it supports gearing for DDR memory with bus speed up to 400MHz (800Mbps).. if you would ever need that(!).

As spotted on Stardot: Z-turn Board featuring Xilinx Zynq-7010/20, is a single-board computer capable of running Linux. It has 667MHz Xilinx XC7Z010/020 Dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 Processor with Xilinx 7-series FPGA logic, either 28k or 85k logic cells depending on model.

The board has lots of I/O including HDMI. It's $99 or $119 depending on model.

http://www.myirtech.com/list.asp?id=502

Here's an affordable FPGA kit with sixteen 5V tolerant I/Os, an Arduino-compatible connecter layout, SDcard, VGA, and HDMI connectors, and an 8000-gate Altera MAX FPGA. The kit also includes a programming cable and an I/O board with 4 digit display. The only RAM is the 42kByte in the FPGA.

http://andybrown.me.uk/2016/04/24/maximator-review/



Headline price is €50 but inclusive price turns out more like €75 shipped to UK.

Hat-tip to Dave/hoglet for mentioning this - it's in Joel's big table of cheap FPGA dev boards.

Terasic's £80 DE0-Nano-SOC is an interesting board - could be obsolete but is still available - it uses a chip with both an Altera FPGA and a dual-core ARM. There's 1G of DDR3 RAM. The FPGA has a massive 300kByte of on-chip RAM and is connected to the ARM by some kind of bridge to the standard AMBA bus. The ARM has USB and Ethernet.



At least 72 I/Os and several on board devices, although no VGA or HDMI. Also an Arduino-compatible set of connectors. All 3V3 unfortunately.

User manual: https://media.digikey.com/pdf/Data%20Sh ... SoC_UM.pdf

As also noted by Windfall, also £80 and also from Terasic, the DE10-Lite.
Again the FPGA (MAX 10 10M50DAF484C7G) has lots of onboard RAM, but this time we also get off-chip SDRAM, 32M x 16bits. Not sure what speed. This time it's a new product, not an obsolete one.
http://www.mouser.co.uk/new/terasic-tec ... ite-board/

I'm curious about what your definition of obsolete is. The DE0 Nano SOC is only two years old, as far as I know (it's a Cyclone V board, not Cyclone IV like the similarly named and much older DE0 Nano). By that standard, nearly every development board on the market is 'obsolete'.

I was only going by what the website says:
Obsolete item.

It may be that this proved not to be a successful dev board and they no longer make them, although Digikey still have 273 left in stock.

Edit: looks like the replacement is DE10-Nano, with Intel inside, instead of ARM.
Edit edit: still ARM inside - see correction below.

Indeed. Well, I stand corrected then. I never saw them retire a board that quickly, though. They're still selling the DE1, and that is 11 years old ...

The DE10 Nano still has a 'hard' ARM though. Not sure where you get the Intel. Except that Intel owns Altera these days.

Oh, that's good, I thought it had turned into an x86 IoT platform. If it's still an ARM, it's still attractive to me.

Looks like the price may have bumped up a bit, £99 maybe, but there's an added HDMI connector.

Arrow has a great competitor to the DE10-Lite at a very nice price point.
The DECA uses a MAX 10 10M50DAF484C6G, the 6 being a faster speed grade.
It also sports HDMI and 512MB DDR3 SDRAM.
https://www.arrow.com/en/products/deca/ ... ment-tools

Looks good, thanks!

Another vote for the Zturn, and a mention that there's now a 'lite' version as well which has a Zynq7007S (single-core ARM) but still manages 23k logic cells for the princely price of $69 (£51) or $75 (£56) for the 7010 version. You don't get the HDMI on the 'lite boards, but the add-on "cape" which supplies the connector is only $29 (£21).

At first I was ignoring the Zturn boards because they came shipped with an HDMI chip that it's impossible to get a data sheet for, and there was no other access to the HDMI port. To add insult to injury, the HDMI core they provided was proprietary and shut itself down after 30 minutes of operation...

Now, however, they provide a standard Xilinx VDMA design (presumably, I'm still waiting on the '020 version of the board to arrive) which sets up the SIL9002A chip and then treats it like an LCD video-out (pixel-clock, pixel-data, hsync, vsync,data-valid). This has no time-out.

For the money, the Zynq boards are pretty much on a par with the S7 boards (Arty etc.) and they throw in a dual-core high-speed ARM chip, and a hard-macro DDR3/4 driver (so you don't waste 30% of your brand-spanking-new Artix35T on the DDR driver). In fact if you say you want the basics of something you can make a single-board computer out of (USB, HDMI, ethernet, SPI etc.) the '020 Zturn board seems to win hands down to me - that's a huge step-up in logic-cells/luts ...


No, I don't work for the company, but I've spent the last few days looking for which board to get as an Xmas present for my next project. The price/performance of the Zturn board is *really* hard to beat. I'm including digilent's boards because they're the cheapest I know of for the Artix/Spartan7 series. If there's cheaper I'm interested to find out.

On the plus side for the Zynq, you get access to the dual ARM cores, and all the peripherals that come with it (USB, ethernet, SPI, I2C, CAN, SD card, etc.) and Vivado isn't that bad an environment to develop in, even if it has its quirks...

Minor niggles on the Zturn:

• It would have been nice to have the USB/SD-card on the right or left sides, so the board could be mounted in a case at the rear and provide access to all the ports. As it stands it looks like my case-depth is pre-determined and the USB will be at the front instead.
• There's no audio on-board to speak of (buzzers don't count)
• None of the outputs are 5v-tolerant. One solution to that might be to put an STM32 connected by SPI (or let the FPGA be memory-mapped if you're feeling adventurous). Then you have N (depending on the part you choose) 5v-tolerant IO's.

At the end of the day though, if you're dropping $100 on a board, you'd be nuts to overlook the zynq - for the price you get a hell of a lot.

I was just reminded of this thread by an email update because I'm subscribed, so let me post a quick update that the Terasic DE0-Nano (which was unavailable for some time) is now back in stock and they made it a bit cheaper too: it was $99 before, now $79 (and if you're a student, you can get them even cheaper).

http://www.terasic.com.tw/cgi-bin/page/ ... 3&PartNo=7

===Jac

(Thanks for the detailed review, SpacedCowboy, and welcome to the forum!)