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

To address Randall's original question:

I use FPGAs in many (probably most) of my commercial projects (because that's the area I work in).

It seems to me that the "problem" with home FPGA projects is that while the hardware has become quite cheap the applications for the larger FPGAs only make an sense at all when the project is big.

It's just daft to use a soft processor on an FPGA or a SOC style FPGA with hard processor cores if you just want to run Linux or make an alarm clock (use a Pi or an Arduino respectively).

Big FPGA projects take a lot of experience and time and are somewhat out of range of the usual home project - even if the basic FPGA board is free.

So for home use even the S7 board offered in the road test is  a big bite. (An aside here, this series of boards from Digilent is a bit lopsided in that they don't have enough accessible IO - 32 pins across the 4 PMOD connectors and about 20 on the Arduino footprint - the board would be massively improved by the addition of a 64 way 0.1" pitch connector with all the IO accessible.)

Small FPGAs are another thing altogether:

The Lattice ICE40 parts are cheap, simple, free tools, cheap eval boards and sensible and viable for  small projects.

The Altera MAX 10 parts are real FPGAs (most modern features available) , free tools (The Altera tool set is my favorite between L, X and A.), cheap boards available, 3.3V single voltage, TQFP packages.

Others have already mentioned the Xilinx XC9572 (wouldn't use it myself but tastes differ !) and the Lattice MachXO parts.

I think because most of the publicity is about the big parts (which are intimidating and hard to use) people are missing out on the virtues of the cheap and simple parts.

How about getting a road test going with ICE40 or Altera MAX10 boards - or even a competition to do something reasonably simple like a clock, timer or frequency meter (with display of your own choice)  using a given (subsidized ?) simple dev board and coded in VHDL or Verilog. No processors allowed.

MK

A real challenge is to get the ARTY to work with "Processing" (the environment that Arduino was derived) and make a FPGA Sketches just like the AVR and PIC.

Now that'd be something grand.

A real challenge is to get the ARTY to work with "Processing" (the environment that Arduino was derived) and make a FPGA Sketches just like the AVR and PIC.

Now that'd be something grand.

OK - I challenge you !

(I'll expect to hear back in about 2025 )

A more "compact" challenge would be to pick a shield and get that doing something useful under FPGA control.

MK

Hmmmm... Different paradigms; Processing is a programming language while VHDL is a hardware description language. Their inherent difference does not make it ideal to use a programming language to describe hardware.

No, one gets processing to work on the Microblaze core and uses VHDL or similar to configure its hardware features.

I did one about 13 years ago. I designed a FPGA microbee(an Australian 1980's computer) and added extras such as PS/2 Mouse and Keyboard, and IDE hard disk support. The design outputs its own colour graphics from the FPGA.

I used a combination of Schematic Capture and VHDL design. I used the VHDL to define my special components and used the Schematic Capture to interconnect them.

As for mixed small designs the PSoC 5 is great as it allows a mixture of Programmable Logic along with an ARM processor.  The PSoC 6 if it gets more UDB (Universal Digital Blocks) combined with its USB hosting capabilities extends its usefulness even more.

Like DAB, I've retired due to illness and its subsequent disabilities and on occasion attempt to enthuse others to learn this fascinating craft.

As DAB says;

"Just a thought."