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

Like there are other obstacles than price for FPGA.

Evaluation Board, Spartan-7 50 FPGA, 256MB RAM, 4 x Pmod Headers, Vivado

Price:£103 (Price is before tax)

Like there are other obstacles than price for FPGA.

Think about it for a second, OK?

You can build a PC for that kind of money.

You can buy 50+ arduinos for that kind of money.

You can buy month worth of food for that kind of money.

You can buy 4 raspberry PI's for that kind of money + get some spare change for some small fun parts.

I think even watching a movies worth of that money is better investment than buying this board.

How delusional are this manufacturers, i bet no one in their right mind buys this garbage in a first place other than on impulse, no wonder they give this crap away for free.

There are things a single FPGA can do that are not possible with 5000 Arduino's, or Pi's. Specifically, throughput related or timing (accuracy) related. When you sent that message through the Internet, it probably went through infrastructure containing dozens (a hundred maybe) FPGA's across the world. The infrastructure manufacturers used FPGA's to produce the best product for a given cost. That's just one example of FPGA use. Those who can use FPGA's will earn that months' worth of food within an hour. The major obstacle is not the cost of the development board, it is the very different skill-set than for an Arduino or Raspberry Pi software programmer. Learning that skill-set ideally requires courses, or books that cost more than the development board. Some resources are free online however, and such a development board can be used to get those skills. But digital knowledge is also required (in contrast for software development on Arduino/Pi), so it is worth studying that too (there are some online resources for that too).

There are things a single FPGA can do that are not possible with 5000 Arduino's, or Pi's. Specifically, throughput related or timing (accuracy) related. When you sent that message through the Internet, it probably went through infrastructure containing dozens (a hundred maybe) FPGA's across the world. The infrastructure manufacturers used FPGA's to produce the best product for a given cost. That's just one example of FPGA use. Those who can use FPGA's will earn that months' worth of food within an hour. The major obstacle is not the cost of the development board, it is the very different skill-set than for an Arduino or Raspberry Pi software programmer. Learning that skill-set ideally requires courses, or books that cost more than the development board. Some resources are free online however, and such a development board can be used to get those skills. But digital knowledge is also required (in contrast for software development on Arduino/Pi), so it is worth studying that too (there are some online resources for that too).

shabaz

Could you point us to some of those resources (especially the free ones or less expensive ones), I know I don't have much time at the moment but FPGAs are something I'm keen to learn.

Kas

Hi Kas,

The good free resources are quite sparse unfortunately : (

I like the free lecture notes here: E2.1 Digital Electronics 2 - Peter Cheung

In terms of books, most are very expensive : ( but the semi-affordable ones I'm using to learn are:

VHDL for Engineers (Kenneth L) and The Student's Guide to VHDL (Peter Ashenden). That latter book is affordable.

I always try to get at least two books on a subject, so I can compare and read from another perspective if something is hard to follow.

For digital electronics, those same lecture notes are useful, plus 'Contemporary Logic Design' (Randy Katz) is low-cost.

Just after I hit "Add Reply"  I searched coursera and edX and found one course on FPGAs and two on VLSI. My issue with online courses is the lack of "motivation". Since I do them as free courses it's amazing how they always seem low priority. What would be cool is if I could do it with someone. Even if its just to compare where I'm holding in the course with. Any takers , the FPGA course could be a helpful beginning...

Kas

Also try Udemy. I am taking their Intro to VHDL course. I got it for $9.99USD for New Year's offer. They have others besides that one. Typical cost as of today, $15USD.

Clive "Max" Maxfield's Bebop to the Boolean Boogie is a good intro to digital logic for the newbie.  You can get first editions for a few bucks and second editions for only a little more.  The beauty of digital logic is that very little has changed since the 20th Century.  The cost per logic function keeps going down, but the basic theory of gates and ALUs really hasn't.  This means you don't need the latest edition of anything and you can get by with cheap used copies.  (I like abebooks.com)

You might have luck at your local public library.  That's how I got started with this in the 1970s, but I was lucky to have a public library with a terrific collection of electronics and computer books.

You can also take a look at the following course made available by NPTEL India

http://nptel.ac.in/courses/117108040/

It covers Digital System Design, VHDL, PLDs and FPGAs.

I was fortunate enough to attend this course in an actual classroom

Good call johnbeetem,  I have really enjoyed Clive's writings (although I don't believe that I have read this one).

Gene