best fpga development board?

You're hoping! IMHO, you should stear well clear of Xilinx's XST.. It has a nasty habbit of synthesizing bad logic. Agggh! It's even screwing me as I right this. The alternatives aren't cheap (synplify for example), but are better.

Cheers, JonB

What ever you do, don't buy ANYTHING from Nu Horizons. Their customer service sucks! And they discontinue products with no notice.

A different question to ask is what is the budget for an fpga board ?

And what size do you need ?

For lower end boards take a look at

Have you guys had a look at the Anlog devices black fin boards ?

I'll be interested to hear your conclusions.

I did a design study for my application a couple of years ago. Pentium vs DSP vs FPGA. The application did not leap out at me as a no-brainer for the FPGA -- processing of data packets, what I would call general scientific computation including division, straight-line fit and some minimization. The figure of merit was processing rate (packets per second) per dollar. And I certainly made a number of hand-waving assumptions in my estimation. Yet (to my surprise) the Pentium and DSP chip came out roughly equivalent. The FPGA won by a factor of 5. Now development effort is another story...

Regards,

-rajeev-

I normally don't plug my employer's products, but what you're asking for is covered quite nicely by the embedded dev kits from Altera as well as from our partner Microtronix. I suggest this approach as putting processor core(s) on the FPGA is very simple these days; for someone with software experience this can make getting started with hardware design a bit more simple as a processor allows you to bring up a design/debug/interface to your hardware with familiar means (software dev. & debug). Also consider a soft-processor has terrific potential for controlling the various hardware processing blocks in a design very easily.

Also note that with any of these products you aren't required to use the processor; they're really just FPGA dev. boards with additional design tools/IP/RTOS support in the box.

Jesse Kempa Altera Corp. jkempa at altera dot com

I'll second Jesse's recommendations. I'm an EE, but have been primarily involved in software. When I and another software guy went to a free class on the Altera Nios running on the Cyclone devkit board we were instantly hooked. The tools and the workflow are very familiar to a software engineer.

Do a google and google groups search if you want more details.

Ken