Survey of FPGA dev boards

[BigEd]

In this earlier post I mentioned some dev boards I knew about.

I see now that there's a list up on the gameduino site which they intend to keep up to date.

Edit: much more up to date, this survey. Thanks to Dave for that.

Boards mentioned there range from $40 to $200. (For some you might need a programming cable at extra cost.)

Edit: Also Enterpoint make dev boards and FPGA modules, and OHO make FPGA modules (also here and here)

Also worth looking out for spartan 6 products which seem to offer twice the performance of spartan 3. See this post further down.

Edit: a more recent thread on DIP format boards:
viewtopic.php?f=10&t=4217

[fachat]

That's a great list! And some are actually quite affordable. I am looking into this, as I am getting closer to my plans of building a board for my 65k project.

André

[ElEctric_EyE]

Hah, I thought you forgot about this BigEd.
But then, I see you let someone else do all the work for you!

More people, hobbyists in particular need to start learning HDL at the earliest stages. I say hobbyists, because we are the ones who do it out of love for the challenge. Not just because it's a 9-5 job. And look at me, I am stuck on schematic usage, because it is what I have learned first.
These boards, and mine, are great tools to becoming masters of the digital age. They are like the Radio Shack 500-in-1 electronic kits of old, except much, much more potent.

[BigEd]

Great analogy - I had one of those, but probably only 100-in-1. In Europe at least, there was also a Philips EE education kit series, which involved spring-fixings for wires in a hardboard substrate. It made the circuit match the circuit diagram nicely, and had rather a good instruction book, which dealt with all sorts of topics beyond the kit's immediate capability.

I hankered after a denshi block kit but never had one - I see you can still get them.

(All very off-topic and more fitting to the nostalgia section...)

Back on topic, that page with the dev boards links to a nice getting-started page with links to HDL resources.

[fachat]

BigEd wrote:

In Europe at least, there was also a Philips EE education kit series, which involved spring-fixings for wires in a hardboard substrate. It made the circuit match the circuit diagram nicely, and had rather a good instruction book, which dealt with all sorts of topics beyond the kit's immediate capability.

OMG, I actually had one of those Philips 2000 kits! I never really understood what was actually behind the schematics, so I was only ever able to play with say varying resistors and caps back then, but no real new schematics. I think I still have the few transistors that came with it, mounted on some separate board so they could be fixed with the spring-fixings.... I might even have some of the springs somewhere. IIRC I used some of them as self-built dampers on a Lego-technics car I got......

André

Edit: sorry for getting off topic ... just igore or open a new thread :-)

[ChuckT]

One of the blogs I'm following is dangerousprototypes.com and this post is important on creating video with FPGA's:

http://dangerousprototypes.com/2011/03/ ... and-fpgas/

They are working on CoolRunner II and XC9500XL CPLD development boards and they will probably end up on Seeedstudio.com for sale.

http://dangerousprototypes.com/docs/CPL ... _tutorials

You can also download the CPLD application handbook from Xilinx. I'll be reading the blog to see what they are doing.

http://dangerousprototypes.com/2011/03/ ... -handbook/

There are a lot of devices out there and these won't be the last but I'm trying to find the best suitable hardware.

[BigEd]

This is good info: do you think it's worth a new topic 'Survey of video circuits'? (Not strictly 6502-related, but so long as it's applicable to 6502)

There's a note on the gameduino site about monochrome VGA using just two resistors and an FPGA, and several mentions of different approaches in previous threads.

(Feel free to start the topic!)

[BitWise]

Some more links on video generation that people might find interesting here:

http://www.microchip.com/forums/tm.aspx?m=385013

[ChuckT]

BigEd wrote:

In this earlier post I mentioned some dev boards I knew about.

My friend recommended Digilent and he said it has a VGA connector:

http://www.digilentinc.com/Products/Det ... od=S3BOARD

It has 1 MB of SRAM which is a lot of memory.

[BigEd]

elsewhere:

Arlet wrote:

Yeah, too bad I don't have a Spartan-6 board.... Digilent has one, but it's $349, which is a bit on the high side.

We've since found a couple of possibilities for less outlay:

Enterpoint's Drigmorn3 for $270 / EUR200 / GBP160
Features:

• spartan6 LX16
  40 i/o which are 5V tolerant
  20 i/o at 3.3V
  an LCD
  USB
  ethernet
  16bit wide SDRAM
  memory card interface
  PS/2 connectors

Avnet's LX9 microboard - User Guide (pdf), Block Diagram. Available for $90, EUR90, PLN449
Features:

• Includes SDK and ChipScope license (on-FPGA logic analyser)
  Spartan-6 XC6SLX9-2CSG324C FPGA (has 32 block RAMs, 2kbyte each)
  64 MB LPDDR SDRAM (16-bit wide)
  128 Mb Multi-I/O SPI Flash
  10/100 Ethernet PHY
  USB-to-UART port
  On-board USB JTAG circuitry
  Two 2x6 PMOD expansion ports, each giving 8 general purpose I/Os
  Single-chip, 3-rail power with Power Good indicator
  Programmable clock chip, initially setup for 40, 67 and 100MHz

Avnet's LX16 Evaluation kit for $225
Features:
Like the LX9, but

• minus ChipScope license
  plus LCD,
  plus more I/O
  plus 8051 on board
  plus some windows-only configuration utility ?!
  plus battery-powered possibility (on-board Li-ion cell)

Here's Xilinx' page on spartan 6 dev kits

[BigEd]

Mixed news from Xess - they've discontinued their cheapest offering, but the now-cheapest is reduced to $55. It's a 40-pin module with a 16-bit wide SDRAM onboard - and the whole design is open source (including SDRAM controller). Downsides: it's 3.3v I/O, it's spartan3 generation, and postage costs will make it less cheap to those outside North America.

[ChuckT]

BigEd wrote:

Mixed news from Xess - they've discontinued their cheapest offering, but the now-cheapest is reduced to $55. It's a 40-pin module with a 16-bit wide SDRAM onboard - and the whole design is open source (including SDRAM controller). Downsides: it's 3.3v I/O, it's spartan3 generation, and postage costs will make it less cheap to those outside North America.

I read that their lowest priced FPGA is now four times as big. I suppose that would be good news for everyone.

[BigEd]

(Edit: I now see this Altera board I've just 'discovered' is in fact mentioned already in the compendium linked in the head post. Ah well.)

I'm stuck into Xilinx tools and parts, but I've just come across this $49 dev kit based on an Altera FPGA, with a high-density 80-way edge connector with perhaps 60 I/Os from the FPGA:

6502.org wrote:

Image no longer available: http://img847.imageshack.us/img847/2685/bemicrodevaltera.png

(16-bit wide RAM, USB-connected, offering a serial interface.)

Here are the lab notes (pdf) for a small system on chip.

Like Xilinx, Altera have a free tool set for windows and linux.

[BigEd]

John Kortink ('windfall' here) has brought the Terasic DE0-Nano board to our attention: it's Altera based, with a 32MByte SDRAM on a 16-bit wide bus, total of 72 GPIO on two 40-pin connectors.

It's USB-powered at 5V but the I/Os are 3V3. One of the demos in the User Manual (pdf) has the memory clocking at 100MHz.



http://www.digikey.co.uk/product-detail ... ND/2625112
http://uk.farnell.com/jsp/search/produc ... ku=2076463

[cjb]

BigEd wrote:

Like Xilinx, Altera have a free tool set for windows and linux.

When saying this sort of thing, it would help to make the distinction about how 'free' it actually is. At one end of the scale, there's the "free" Microchip PIC32 tools... which demand a licence spyware be installed, to run a lobotomized GPL-2-Tivo-ized GCC-3.x.x with codesize limits, and the support libraries are very un-free. Amtel's tools are only a little better. NXP's are binary blobs that'll only work on the computers of 5 years ago..

"32 bit Intel executables? That's /so/ 20th Century..."