The kit arrived very well packed, in a big box, bigger than I was expecting.
It was very nice to see that it includes 3 types of power cords, making it easy to use the kit in any country.
The kit also includes both an USB cable and an ethernet cable, so it can be used immediately, saving the user for the hassle of finding an ethernet cable in order to play with the board.
There is no CD or DVD included, but I don't think that this is an impediment to it's usage, since in our days most of the people have good internet connections.
I heard many people saying that this is merely a demo board rather than a starter kit because it doesn't have some GPIOs, but I think that it can still be used for development. Some GPIOs would have been nice, but there are a lot of things to play with on this board - the transceivers, the lcd, the external ram and the flash memory.
This is the first FPGA from Altera that I've worked with, so I was totally new to Altera's development tools. Playing with this board I was most impressed by Altera's SoPC (System on Programmable Chip) Builder, based on NIOS II processor. I like the fact that it has a graphical interface, in the last period I took a look at many soft core processors (openrisc, leon, ZPU) and I found it very hard to get started with them without a wizzard. When I was looking at the soft core processors, one of my requirements was a C compiler since it makes the development signifiantly faster when compared to hand written assembly. I also have a board with a Xilinx FPGA and NIOS II processor made me to take a look at the Microblaze, the alternative from Xilinx .. suprise .. after designing a basic system, I found out that I need to purchase a licence in order to play with Microblaze. I would choose NIOS II for my projects because it's free.
The next thing that I've thought, was 'If I design a good product, is it easy to port it to an ASIC ?', so I've studied this thing also and I've found about Altera's Hardcopy ASIC series which provides an easy way to take the design to ASIC.
The SoPC Builder is a very nice thing, but the generated systems issue lots of warnings at synthesis .. I was expecting a system generated to this tool to be almost perfect .. not to issue hundreds of warnings. This is an area that certainly needs improvement.
When it comes to synthesis tools, I feel the need to compare Quartus with Xilinx ISE. I was used to Xilinx ISE, because I had a board with a Xilinx FPGA before. I didn't use to specify too many timing contrains (maybe this is a bad practice ?!) as most of the time the synthesis tool would infer them correctly, but when I used Quartus, I found out that I have to specify manually the clocks - I liked more to have the infered by the synthesis tool.
I have a dual boot system, and many times I use Linux .. so I tried to install Quartus on Linux in order to be able to better analyze the network traffic made by the ethernet transceiver. I had some issues installing it on linux, but I finally succeeded. When I thought that everything is ok, I've connected the board and I've found out that the embedded USB Blaster is not recognized on Ubuntu because it has a kernel that is too new. I've solved this problem too by an uggly hack and I was finally able to use the board on linux.
I've played a bit with the NIOS II development environment and I liked the NIOS II console tab from eclipse, that allows me to print text using jtag uart.
Another intersting thing that I've found on this board is the power monitor:
I found it looking at the demo application which exposes board's features. I've got interested to see how does the demo application work, so I've installed the support materials from Altera, I've opened the examples in Quartus and I've tried to synthesize them, but the Quartus issued lots of warnings and ultimately failed with some errors. I would expect to find those projects updated since they're vital for a new user. If I have no working example, how am I supposed to get started ?! .. and it wasn't easy to get started.
Ultimately I think that the documentations should also be improved. I'd like to see more comprehensive documentation related to the ethernet PHY (on this board it's been used one from Marvell) and the mega cores. Most of the documentation is centerd on NIOS II .. but I'd like to be able to use those components from hardware also .. when you're working at 1 Gbps, NIOS II can't always solve all problems (even though that it has a SGDMA controller).
I found very nice that the board can be plugged in a PCI express slot, but I couldn't find an example of device driver for Linux. I'm mainly interested in using it on Linux since it's a more flexible operating system, and more suited for networking.
The kit is very nice, but there are lots of small issues that make me think that it was designed in hurry. For example, a broken link, that can be seen on a page running from the demo:
I think that those minor issues should be solved because I'd think twice before making a big project on a platform that has a lot of minor issues. I wouldn't like to increase the development time unnecessarely because there are some bugs that sit on the way.
Anyway .. Altera is hardware oriented, so I won't judge it very much for the software. When it comes to hardware, after seeing this board, I have a very good impression, but the development tools need more attention.
