I'm not the right person to ask "Which FPGA board should I buy?" I've got six, and two more are winging their way in the mail to me as I write these words. All of them are really good boards, and one will always be better-suited to any given project than the others.
Perhaps a better question would be: "If you were stuck on a desert island with only one FPGA board with which to pass the time, which FPGA board would you want to have with you?" In fact, I have yet to find the one I would choose -- a Digilent Nexys3 with an associated VmodBB breadboard would be pretty close, but I would want HDMI too, and the Spartan 6 LX16 FPGA on this board is quite small in the scheme of things.
The problem is that every board has something different to offer, and I'm always looking for new things to try out. So while I'm waiting for my latest FPGA development boards to arrive, the following is a brief rundown of my current collection of boards.
Click on the photo below to see a slideshow of these boards.
Clockwise from top left: Open Bench Logic Sniffer, Papilio One, Digilent Basys2, Altera DE0-Nano, and a Digilent Nexys2 with FX2 Breadboard.
Open Bench Logic Sniffer: More of an appliance than an FPGA development board, this FPGA-based logic analyzer makes a great board to hijack for a small FPGA project that requires 5V inputs. Based on the Papilio design, the Open Bench Logic Sniffer uses a Spartan 3E-250 FPGA and has space for two 8-bit Papilio wings. At US $50, it is pretty good value for money when used as either a logic analyzer or a stand-alone FPGA board.
Papilio One: This no-frills FPGA board comes equipped with either a Spartan 3E-250 or -500 FPGA, power supplies, configuration flash, and a USB interface. It is designed to be expanded by adding up to six 8-bit or three 16-bit daughter boards and is ideally suited to the electronics hobbyist. One nice feature is that all of the expansion connectors are supplied with 5V, 3.3V, and 2.5V power, allowing a wide range of devices to be added. The absence of any other on-board connectors other than the USB host interface makes it perfect for embedding into custom builds.
All programming and host communication is over USB interface. JTAG is presented on the PCB, but no external JTAG adapter is required to use the board. I've also got a few "wing" add-ons that convert this board into a full FPGA development board with switches, LEDs, VGA ports, and other plugs and sockets. The ability to augment the functionality of the main board in this way provides a flexible solution that adds a lot of value. I like this board very much, and -- in fact -- I have just taken advantage of the All Programmable Planet special offer to order an additional board. (I won't be adding the headers to this new board, thereby making it much easier to slip into my laptop bag.)
As well as being used as an FPGA development board, software and firmware are available to make the board act much like an Arduino microcontroller prototyping platform -- a customized version of the Arduino GUI is available, which merges the AVR binary with a bit-file containing the AVR8 core, and then reprograms the FPGA or flash.
Not shown in the main photo is my Papilio Plus prototype, which is the same form-factor as the Papilio One, but with a Spartan 6LX9 FPGA and 512KB of SRAM (not quite enough to display a 1024 x 768 frame buffer). This is the one I used for my DSP48 based Mandelbrot Fractal viewer that made Hackaday.com, as discussed in Chris's blog. I'm now using this board to run games from FPGAarcade.com as a screensaver for my PC at work.
The ADCs are never what I want. I'm thinking that next time I'll pick the right ADC/DAC + what ever comms/other bits I need and lay a quick dirty 2-layer PCB, with one of these on it for FPGA: http://www.thin-layer-embedded.com/ just $40. The RN-171 I use for wifi almost costs more.
Only a small board bring up. Has anyone used one of these? Opinions?
FPGA's are powerful beasties, but are easily hamstrung by their I/O options. Assuming you can get the bucketloads of data in, you need to display it - or pass it on to a PC. So give me that LCD display, but give me a High Speed USB connection too! if the USB port is only providing power and a JTAG programmer, it's a "fail" from me.
My first FPA card (LatticeXP2 Brevia2): Fail. Papilio: Borderline (high speed USB option available via plugin wing). DE0 nano: from what I've read, Fail.
Lastly, next to the standard Blinking Lights and Buttons, I want: at least one high resolution, reasonably fast, ADC. 12 to 14 bits, 100Msps, 2 channels preferred. That should allow the Professor to build a Software-Defined-Radio Receiver. For a transmitter, I'd have to add some DAC's.
Of these 6 boards, I would be most interested in the Logic Sniffer (dual purpose), Papilio One (arcade games amongst other things), and the Altera NE0-Nano (lots of possibilities). Don't own any of these yet, but saving my pennies for the Papilio One.
MikePDX 7/26/2012 1:07:13 PM User Rank Clever Clogs
Digilent Atlys
Digilent's Atlys definitely belongs on your Desert Island bench. I'm very pleased and well-enabled by the one on my personal bench.
For one thing it's Spartan-6 based, which is important since S6 has the same basic 6-LUT architecture as Virtex-6 and the 7-series parts. Not the low-end part either, it's a good-sized LX45 with plenty of block RAMs and DSP cores. And a built-in SDRAM controller with 128 MB on the Atlys PCB.
Atlys is rich with the usual peripherals plus 10/100/1G Ethernet, USB2 and four HDMI ports, two in and two out. In fact Atlys was the board used by a university computer security lab used to implement a real-time HDCP crack. (No they're not ripping off Blu-ray movies, they've exposed its security opening.)
Atlys comes portably packaged with its power supply and USB cable in a VHS tape sized box. It's US$350, US$200 for academic use.
Choice of FPGA vendor, along with RS-232, RS-485, PS/2, 10/100 Fast Ethernet, USB 2.0, S/PDIF, MIDI, Dual SD Card slots, 5 different memeory chips, Real time clock, Relays, Infra Red, audio, touch screen and lots more.
Duane Benson 7/25/2012 2:27:43 PM User Rank Blogger
I'd want a lot
The Diligent Nexys2 with FX2 Breadboard comes the closest out of your set. But if I really was stranded on a desert island, I'd want something with some sort of a display attached; both a character based display and a bit-mapped display with adequate frame buffer. I'd also like a few more peripherals on the board too, such as switches and potentiometers, motor drivers and motors.
Mostly, though, I'd like an antenna so, with the help of the Professor, I could design a software-defined-radio and call someone for rescue.
rlramirez77 7/25/2012 1:58:06 PM User Rank Beginner
Received my Papilio One yesterday
So now my bench actually has an FPGA board on it!
However, as this trend of FPGA boards continues, I imagine I will add others. I have several versions of Arduino boards and would like to see more boards along the lines of this:
If I were an evil genius working on a plan for world domination (with regard to enterprise-level data storage solutions) I would be seriously considering building my design around a Zynq All Programmable SoC.
I would like to present to fellow readers of All Programmable Planet a new technique that I have invented to serialize data within the FPGA's main fabric at 1.5Gb/s.
As with most things, my feeling is that there is no better way to understand high-speed serial links than to implement one from the ground up, so that is what I've set out to do.
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