Trying to select a development board, can somebody help me make an informed choice?

April and June in school, and for other projects, mainly to exercise VHDL and design interesting projects. The school project itself is the design of a general purpose DSP data path.

need and the price.

I have the 3E starter kit and it is nice, but depends on what you need. It is from Xilinx, so it works with your ISE installation (if USB works from within your VM installation, but should be no problem). The advantage is that it has many peripheral components intergrated on the board and a VGA connector.

But if you need e.g. just 16 colors, you could easily build your own VGA output with a R2R network (that's what they are using on the starter kit anyway), or attach a LCD display, and then you could buy a cheaper kit, like this nice one:

This uses a Cyclone FPGA from Altera. I have this, too, and it is awesome. I think for beginners the Quartus IDE is easier than the Xilinx IDE, especially the MegaWizard is nice.

--
Frank Buss, http://www.frank-buss.de
piano and more: http://www.youtube.com/user/frankbuss

The Spartan-6 has a different architecture to the Spartan-3*, so it's a little tricky to compare them directly using some of these numbers. If you have an existing design, you can try implementing it on the two and see how well it maps to either architecture.

In general, the Spartan-6 is newer and better, and adds some hardware (PLL, SERDES), which may or may not be useful to you.

As Frank said, a VGA output port can be quite easy to add on. If you're interested in HDMI/DVI, it will be a lot easier to buy a board that includes this facility.

Personally, I've found that while not the cheapest board by a long shot, the Digilent ATLYS currently offers the best value for money (at least in the Xilinx space) if you qualify for the academic discount as it includes quite a large chip (XC6SLX45), DDR2, gigabit Ethernet, four HDMI ports (two input, two output), and high speed I/O. I've written some notes on the board here:

I've also compiled a list of cheap development boards:

and ISE inside it, but how does this translate in my choices for programming the selected board?

I use ISE through Windows on Parallels Desktop and there are no problems whatsoever. Make sure you use one the supported Linux distributions (and a supported version of that distribution - this will not necessarily be the latest!) and you shouldn't have too much trouble with ISE.

Some non-Xilinx boards use their own JTAG adapter and proprietary software, so make sure a Linux/Mac version is available. Alternatively, you can get a Xilinx Platform Cable USB II (or something that pretends to be one) and you should have no trouble using Xilinx iMPACT directly.

Joel

een April and June in school,

I need and the price.

and three of the five boards come from the US, while 2 come from the UK, an= d I live in Belgium.

Atlys boards are in stock at trenz electronic in Germany:

and so is the 3A starter kit:

Regards,

Kolja

Jurgen

Have you seen our ADV7202 module

es/adv7202.html? and does that cover what you want to do? We also have a HDMI solution on the way that might of interest to some people.

John Adair Enterpoint Ltd.

een April and June in school, and for other projects, mainly to exercise VH= DL and design interesting projects. The school project itself is the design= of a general purpose DSP data path.

I need and the price.

and three of the five boards come from the US, while 2 come from the UK, an= d I live in Belgium.

tever type), which is also something I would like to have.

at the LX16 will reach its maximum earlier than the XC3S700A? Conversely, d= oes the lesser amount of distributed RAM on the XC3S700A mean that it could= be that in a pipelined design it has less possibilities than the LX16?

y favor the Drigmorn-2, but does the choice of the XC3S700A FPGA in that ca= se limit me in my design choices?

lbox and ISE inside it, but how does this translate in my choices for progr= amming the selected board?

It looks like you have a Xilinx preference, but if you willing to try other FPGA vendors, Terasic.com has some surprisingly low-cost Altera FPGA development boards.

I bought their DE2-70 board and really like it. It is in your price range and has some of the features you want, such as video out. It has a Cyclone IV FPGA that is much larger than the Spartan FPGAs you mentioned. Also, Altera's free version of Quartus II (their synthesis/place&route tools) supports the device on the DE2-70.

As far as delivery time, they are based in Taiwan. Mine took a few weeks for delivery to the US.

Good luck!

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