Need suggestion on FPGA kit

You cannot receive appropriate guidance without communicating what you want to do with this board. General logic? Video? Embedded computing? Storage applications? PCIe peripherals?

Let us know, please.

I agree with John_H. What do you want to do with the FPGA? I curious why you chose the Virtex-5 FPGA and a Stratix-3 FPGA? Are you looking for specific features? Do you have a limit on how much money you can spend? If you are new to FPGAs, then you may be better off starting with a simpler and cheaper board, for example a Xlinix Sparta-3E stater board ($150USD), and then moving on to the more complex and expensive ML505 board ($11195USD). I'm not familiar with Altera products, but I assume that they also have FPGA boards. Just my 2 cents.

-Dave Pollum

Well,

All Virtex 5 family members: LX, LXT, SX, SXT are all now in full production.

Stratix 3 is sampling the first (and simplest) device.

There are no transceivers planned for Stratix 3.

Virtex 5 FXT is scheduled to be released, soon, for initial engineering samples. Contact your FAE for the early access program.

Other than actually having and shipping 65nm parts for almost one and one half years with no competition at all, as opposed to just releasing the first 65nm high performance FPGA one and one half years late to market (which speaks to supply, and available feature sets and available parts): you haven't given us enough information to really help you.

Austin

ALL 5 ? I count 4 ?

Antti

15 family members is what I count from the data sheet....

There is no such thing as SX (no transceivers).

Sorry about that, SX always is SXT.

page 2, Table 1.

Aust> >> Well,

thanks friends

Our intention is to use the kit for embedded applications. The choice is "Virtex-5 LXT ML505 Evaluation Platform (HW-V5-ML505- UNI-G)". Is there any other FPGA kit which has better configuration(and feautures) in Altera than Virtex-5 specially for embedded applications.

A good question,

This board is presently not available with a Virtex 5 FX part (which has the IBM PowerPC(tm). That will be available soon, as the Virtex 5 FX family has not yet been announced for general ES shipments.

Until then, the LX and SX devices may be placed on this board, and you may use the MicroBlaze soft processor.

So, the question is: how powerful a processor is required? As Altera offers no hard embedded processor, and their NIOS2 is similar in performance to our MicroBlaze, the IBM PowerPC represents quite a step up in capability.

For example, full LINUX may be run by the PowerPC, but only LINUX-Lite may run on the soft processors. The reason for this is more advanced processors have the memory management which is required by LINUX for all of its features.

If you do not plan on running an operating system, or your operating system is very simple, then either soft processor solution is probably adequate.

If Altera had a competitive offering to the ML505 board, I am sure that they would have posted here by now.

All V5 devices have a PCIe core, and combined with the transcievers, a

1, 2, or 4 lane PCIe interface is provided by this development pcb (I think, but I would have to check to be sure -- the chip has the capability, I just would have to see if the 505 is the right pcb, as I haven't memorized all the numbers and features of the support platforms).

Austin

We have recently been using a Xilinx ML506 board with good effect as a logic verification platform.

In many cases we need to have a software interface to our designs in order to really debug them. The ML50X boards have a PCI Express 1x edge connector that allows you to plug the board into a pcie slot in a cheap PC.

The Virtex 5 T parts have the tranceivers and PCIe endpoint that really make it easy to get an interface up and running quickly. A skilled linux programmer put together a driver in an afternoon and now we are writing test programs against production firmware.

This is more work to get going than a vhdl testbench but it runs at full speed once you get it going. In our case, we are verifying DSP logic that requires hundreds of millions of clock cycles to really say it is working. With real hardware in the loop we can quickly write C test programs that loop over the entire parameter space of the design.

V5 PCIe really works!

Pete

yeah wrote:

I have been quite satisfied with the Virtex-4 ML403 development board.Read my blog to find out more.

Sven