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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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  • Now it depends on what do you mean about "building the next project".

    Do you mean building the project till the final stage or do you mean building a prototype in order to test the concept of your future device/product. The second is easier as there are a lot of development boards that can be used for this purpose and FPGA manufacturers provide some free tools to start using these devices. Prototyping/designing with FPGAs has become easier and this is demonstrated by many students participating in FPGA design competitions (ex. Digilent Design Contest, Xilinx Open Hardware University design contest – just started, InnovateFPGA Contest).

     

    FPGAs are good for prototyping and not only for devices that will be built using FPGAs. Using today FPGAs you can build an entire SoC, you can try and explore different architectures for your system as you can reconfigure FPGA many times.

     

    As other said these devices now get packed with a lot of resources and it could be a waste to use them only to light up some LEDs or send the value read from a sensor. But for those who are starting to do embedded system design based on FPGAs, this could be the starting project, a project that is familiar to them, maybe from previous projects developed with microcontrollers.

     

    One thing that stops me starting a new project with an FPGA (and not only) it the size of designing tools and their permanent change that needs updating or even reinstalling the tools. This sometimes means also upgrading your computer and your OS. For someone who is not working with FPGAs on a daily basis, you can find yourself in the situation that for starting a new project with FPGA you must install a new version of tools.  The entire change of the toolset (as it was passing from Xilinx Foundation to Xilinx ISE/WebPack and then to Xilinx Vivado) implies also restarting the learning curve.

     

    I am expecting something like what happened in the microcontroller area (online compilers, ex. mbed), the advent of the online development tools for FPGAs, so you don't have to occupy Gigs of hard disk space with designing tools that you use just for a (small) project and spend time with reinstalling the developing tools every x months to have resolved the last software bugs of the tools.

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  • Now it depends on what do you mean about "building the next project".

    Do you mean building the project till the final stage or do you mean building a prototype in order to test the concept of your future device/product. The second is easier as there are a lot of development boards that can be used for this purpose and FPGA manufacturers provide some free tools to start using these devices. Prototyping/designing with FPGAs has become easier and this is demonstrated by many students participating in FPGA design competitions (ex. Digilent Design Contest, Xilinx Open Hardware University design contest – just started, InnovateFPGA Contest).

     

    FPGAs are good for prototyping and not only for devices that will be built using FPGAs. Using today FPGAs you can build an entire SoC, you can try and explore different architectures for your system as you can reconfigure FPGA many times.

     

    As other said these devices now get packed with a lot of resources and it could be a waste to use them only to light up some LEDs or send the value read from a sensor. But for those who are starting to do embedded system design based on FPGAs, this could be the starting project, a project that is familiar to them, maybe from previous projects developed with microcontrollers.

     

    One thing that stops me starting a new project with an FPGA (and not only) it the size of designing tools and their permanent change that needs updating or even reinstalling the tools. This sometimes means also upgrading your computer and your OS. For someone who is not working with FPGAs on a daily basis, you can find yourself in the situation that for starting a new project with FPGA you must install a new version of tools.  The entire change of the toolset (as it was passing from Xilinx Foundation to Xilinx ISE/WebPack and then to Xilinx Vivado) implies also restarting the learning curve.

     

    I am expecting something like what happened in the microcontroller area (online compilers, ex. mbed), the advent of the online development tools for FPGAs, so you don't have to occupy Gigs of hard disk space with designing tools that you use just for a (small) project and spend time with reinstalling the developing tools every x months to have resolved the last software bugs of the tools.

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