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We've come a long way in our love affair with FPGAs. What do you think?

rscasny

i love my fpgasI've been working in the element14 community since 2016. I can remember back then, the Raspberry Pi seemed to be the element14 community's first love. Of course, Arduino tried breaking us in two, to quote an old Joe Jackson song. But it didn't work. Then a few years later we got serious about our relationship with FPGAs. And the community hasn't stopped loving it.

But our love affair with FPGAs has changed, as all relationships are bound to do. Years ago, we were just trying to get to know each other. But our relationship began warming up with a few webinars, which led us to our Path to Programmable 1 and 2.

We then sweetened our love affair with FPGAs with AI and machine learning from Project14. And after all these years we are finding new ways to get to know one another.

Perhaps you can tell me how well our love affair with FPGAs is going by voting in the polls below. Thanks!

Randall

-element14 Team

  • in reply to kmikemoo

    Thanks. Learning from the conversations in the community.

  • in reply to DAB

    FPGA projects are fun. Some FPGA projects are quite designer-friendly.

  • in reply to dang74

    I went for 50-100MHz. Back in the days of Spartan 3, I did a lot of stuff in the area of 50-80 MHz that needed very little attention to the timing (does depend to a certain extent on how you do your logic design and the style of your HDL writing, though).

    In case you haven't looked at them, the small iCE40UP5K parts are 5K LEs and sell for $10.

    iCE40UP5K

  • in reply to jc2048

    I agree that 50MHz to 100MHz is generally painless as well.  I picked up a couple of ICE parts a few months back.  I haven't done anything with them yet though.

  • in reply to javagoza

    Unfortunately I am suffering from ADD issues which makes learning new technical things very difficult.

  • in reply to DAB

    Sorry, it's hard for me to express myself in English. I hope that contact with the element14 community will make those issues stop going any further.

  • The Quiz was not correct. It assumed (ass out of you and me) what type of engineer I was could not answer it correctly as there was NO Integration Engineer. The questions were very one-sided I really don't care for them as you can only do hardware/gate reductions. And If you don't have their supper dupper software for BIG BUCKS you're screwed.  Then you need the razzle-dazzle BIG BUCKS programmer.. No, now you are happy (maybe) OPS!! they don't support the chip you picked anymore. Don't you just love it?  Now more software and maybe a new programmer or maybe just an adapter. 

  • in reply to phoenixcomm

    I do have to agree on the BIG BUCKS issue.  I've started my project with an artix-7 (free ML) but have concluded I will probably need to step up to a ventrix...

    $3000 for a license, please!

  • in reply to phoenixcomm

    This is only a light-hearted poll (possibly originally meant for Valentine's Day, given the 'love' theme). It wouldn't have been feasible for Randall to list all the possible variations of engineer - just choose 'other' and say in the comments (like you did). I thought the questions were more odd than one-sided - a lot of the questions seemed to be aimed at programmers - but it doesn't really matter too much. It gets us talking about FPGAs.

    "And If you don't have their supper dupper software for BIG BUCKS you're screwed."

    Most of the manufacturers have free (as in cost) design software for their smaller parts. It's only the larger, more complex parts that require paid-for software.

    "Then you need the razzle-dazzle BIG BUCKS programmer."

    All the evaluation boards I've got, except one, have a programmer on the board. The exception is a Max II board, but I got the programmer with the board for very little extra. But you're right that the official programmers are expensive for what they are.

  • It is quite interested that nobody voted FPGA application for Data Centers. I think ML/HLS on Xilinx platform is a good path for Data Center applications. I am planning this path for one of my hobby FPGA projects in 2023 now. However, I did not voted this option too. Why? Because it might take me over 160 hours in 2023 to get a good prototype project up into running on Xilinx ZynqMP SoC system. I am planning my bandwidth for my hobby projects now. It is just March in 2023 now. I am already feeling the compelling force from Element14 community.