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What's Stopping You Building Your Next Project with an FPGA? (Please, Don't Blame the Cost!)

rscasny

The community does a ton of projects with MCUs. If they do the job for you, that's great. But the element14 community is about learning, experimenting and roadtesting. In this spirit, I am proposing that you should try building your next project with an FPGA (SoC), if it suits the application, of course. What's stopping you? Oh, some members have voiced the cost issue. Granted, some FPGAs do cost a lot. But chip manufacturers are rolling out economical chipsets that most makers, pro-makers or experienced hobbyists can afford. (If you can't, then apply to a RoadTest and if you win you can get a dev board for FREE.) I think FPGA / SoCs will move into a more important place for electronic designers, especially for IoT applications. Perhaps it's time to experiement with one. What's stopping you?

 

Here's a link to a current roadtest:Digilent ARTY S7 Dev Board (Xilinx Spartan 7)   Apply today!

 

Randall Scasny

RoadTest Program Manager

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  • For me, there are different factors to consider whether a FPGA is a valid solution or not.

    1. not everything needs an FPGA: many times simple logic or a CPLD is enough, sometimes you can use the flexibility of a MCU (and can use all the nicer peripherals)
    2. packages and power requirements: many (all?) FPGAs some in hard-to-use packages such as BGA, and their power requirements are not always simple (multiple different voltages, high currents, decoupling requirements). You can solve that by using existing breakout boards (e.g. the TinyFPGA mentioned above), but it adds to the cost and needs room.
    3. learning curve: procedural programming in C (e.g. the Arduino) is quite accessible, easy to grasp and there is a lot of documentation out there. Learning Verilog or VHDL with its very hardware-driven concepts takes more time, and its more difficult to debug (no step-by-step debugger...). This can be solved by taking the needed time, starting small and learning systematically.
    4. cost of tooling: when the free versions of the IDEs are not enough, it can get expensive (esp. when you need these IP modules, e.g. to implement a CPU core in an FPGA, or for special peripherals). Fortunately this seems to be solved by time, more and more stuff seems to be available on the free tool versions.

    That said, an FPGA is the best solution when you have to do with high-speed data and signals, especially when its massively in parallel. A good example are logic analyzers, or anything to do with image handling (think of 4k digital movie cameras).

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  • For me, there are different factors to consider whether a FPGA is a valid solution or not.

    1. not everything needs an FPGA: many times simple logic or a CPLD is enough, sometimes you can use the flexibility of a MCU (and can use all the nicer peripherals)
    2. packages and power requirements: many (all?) FPGAs some in hard-to-use packages such as BGA, and their power requirements are not always simple (multiple different voltages, high currents, decoupling requirements). You can solve that by using existing breakout boards (e.g. the TinyFPGA mentioned above), but it adds to the cost and needs room.
    3. learning curve: procedural programming in C (e.g. the Arduino) is quite accessible, easy to grasp and there is a lot of documentation out there. Learning Verilog or VHDL with its very hardware-driven concepts takes more time, and its more difficult to debug (no step-by-step debugger...). This can be solved by taking the needed time, starting small and learning systematically.
    4. cost of tooling: when the free versions of the IDEs are not enough, it can get expensive (esp. when you need these IP modules, e.g. to implement a CPU core in an FPGA, or for special peripherals). Fortunately this seems to be solved by time, more and more stuff seems to be available on the free tool versions.

    That said, an FPGA is the best solution when you have to do with high-speed data and signals, especially when its massively in parallel. A good example are logic analyzers, or anything to do with image handling (think of 4k digital movie cameras).

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