Recommend a beginners FPGA development kit

Question

An engineering friend of mine could really benefit from learning more about FPGAs. I suggested getting a simple devkit to get some hands on experience programming and designing with them. When he asked what to get, I will admit, I was at a loss.

So, if anyone can recommend something that would be great.

Thanks ahead of time.

Cabe

ezekiel · Accepted Answer

I think that you point is probably the central motivator for the selection of a chip vendor. I think you hit the nail on the head with your last comment about the FAE. If you have an excellent *local* FAE then you will get excellent support. This is my experience too. Our local Arrow office hired (stole) the local Altera FAE and so they can give same day customer support to some key clients in our city. This is why I'm cheering on Altera. As an update to my BeMicro dev stick, I found the following webpages from its manufacturer: BeMicro FPGA-stick: http://www.hitex.com/index.php?id=1489&L=2//controllers/My BeMicro SDK: http://www.hitex.com/index.php?id=3180&L=2//controllers/My You will find info about the prototyping expansion board, its connector and the software development kit.

Former Member · Answer

There are virtually tons of inexpensive development boards out there. Xilinx has a $49 Spartan 3 board, for example. Development software is free, and the boards come with demo programs. If you just go to the FPGA manufacturer sites(Xilinx, Altera, Lattice) you'll find them. The distributors (Avnet, Arrow, etc.) also have some of their own development boards. You probably want to get a kit that comes with a download cable, or you're going to have to go buy one. Barry

ezekiel · Answer

Consider checking out the BeMicro [$49] ( http://www.altera.com/b/nios-bemicro-evaluation-kit.html ) or the BeMicro-SDK [$79] ( http://www.altera.com/b/bemicro-sdk.html ) from Altera.

Recommend a beginners FPGA development kit

Top Replies