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

The iceStorm toolchain is very promising, and might be my reason to convert over to the ICE40 series. But they mostly come in hobbyist-unfriendly packages, so I would need to rely on breakout boards (the TinyFPGA B series looks promising).

Start with a project that needs a just-too-much amount of logic (some counters, gates, decoders - around the level you would need to build a seven-segment-clock or a frequency counter). In the best case something that you have already build and understand. This makes debugging easier because you understand the circuit and can concentrate on learning the tools and the FPGA stuff.

Buy a not-too-expensive FPGA board (e.g. Numato.com has Elbert and Mimas which come with seven-segment-displays on board). Then Install the software, grab a VHDL or Verilog tutorial and try to implement your circuit in the FPGA (Numato also has example projects for their boards).

If you want to, you can even skip the VHDL / Verilog part and use s schematic (at least with the Xilinx tools, as I did with my first frequency counter experiment).

For me, it is availability, of my time that is!

I was able to procure an Altera (Terasic) DE-1 for $65USD. I have it now and am working toward freeing up some time this year to learn VHDL I don't care if it is converting it into an LED blinker! I want to start learning this technology. Some decades ago I had the opportunity to work with Xilinx chips. Unfortunately, I left the position before the project was finished and never saw the fruits (if any) of my labor.

Add a PMOD2 VGA adapter to your Arty and make a video game!

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.

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

hlipka  wrote:

 

The iceStorm toolchain is very promising, and might be my reason to convert over to the ICE40 series. But they mostly come in hobbyist-unfriendly packages, so I would need to rely on breakout boards (the TinyFPGA B series looks promising).

Those TinyFPGA boards look interesting.  I hadn't heard of them before, so thank you for the pointer!

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.

I have to say for me it is I don't really know where to start.  I've looked at a couple of tutorials and can follow them to a point, but without knowing more about the different boards, its hard to decide what to buy.  Then there is the software, what should I use?  is it the best choice? will it support only certain boards or will it support any?  If I take the time to learn one way, will I be able to use it anywhere. 

I will say its a field I'd like to learn, but I'm not sure how to get into it without having a project in mind to build.  It would be nice if there were a small course for it that included the required hardware for a small fee. 

Thanks

Dana.