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Xilinx Spartan-7 FPGA Maker Board by Digilent giveaway

kk99

Hi,
I am after a review of Xilinx Spartan-7 FPGA board and now I am participating a the Path to Programmable training project. I would like to a give a Xilinx Arty S7 board from roadtest review for a person whose is interested to make a roadtest, project or would like to learn FPGA based this board. Please let me know in comments if you are interested.

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  • That's a really generous offer. It's things like this that really makes this feel like a community.

     

    I was thinking of trying out FPGAs but after some deliberation (and advice) I was thinking I was more likely to go the Cypress PSoC route. I'm sure someone else will jump at your very kind offer.

  • in reply to Fred27

    I've spent some time this morning looking at the PSOC programmable logic in the light of several comments in E14 suggesting it as a low cost route into learning about FPGA.

     

    My conclusion is that it is no such thing.

     

    The programmable logic in the PSOCS is minimal, each UDP amounts to a rather limited pair of PLDs and a kind of odd ultra risc 8 bit processor (DataPath module). The biggest PSOCs have 24 of them. As a peripheral to an ARM Cortex processor it's quite nice and might be useful for quite a range of things - but using it is nothing like using an FPGA. The best bit of it (the Datapath module) is programmed in the Cypress tools (doesn't appear reasonable to program it in Verilog). To try and put it into perspective - the CPLD logic in the biggest PSOC is about 192 LUT + flip flops and the datapaths about another 768 pairs - just about equivalent to the very smallest (1000 LUT Lattice ice40 FPGA but only 20% or so can be programmed sort of like an FPGA.

     

    So if you want do something specific and the PSOC fits the bill - great.

     

    If you want to learn about FPGA and FPGA design flows - get an FPGA. It might cost you £20 more, but no worse than that, you'll be able to choose between VHDL and Verilog (or use both) and what you learn will be much more generally applicable.

     

    MK

  • in reply to michaelkellett

    You definitely have some good points and extensive FPGA knowledge. Your input is much appreciated. However, everyone's requirements are different. If the PSoC turn out to not be quite what I thought (or I get the bug and want a "real" FPGA), then the iCEstick is on my list.

     

    Anyway, let's not clog up kk99's generous offer thread with slightly off-topic chat.

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  • in reply to michaelkellett

    You definitely have some good points and extensive FPGA knowledge. Your input is much appreciated. However, everyone's requirements are different. If the PSoC turn out to not be quite what I thought (or I get the bug and want a "real" FPGA), then the iCEstick is on my list.

     

    Anyway, let's not clog up kk99's generous offer thread with slightly off-topic chat.

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