1. Home
  2. Field-Programmable Gate Arrays
  3. How to find an FPGA board

How to find an FPGA board

How do I make sense out of the list of boards in the FAQ, other then going through them one at a time. It would help if I could sort them by price and interface.

I want something cheap (under $500), with PCI or PCIe. It needs to include the interface to the PCI/PCIe. A $500 board is useless if it requires spending $2500 for IP to communicate with the PCI/PCIe. It also needs to include device drivers for Windows.

I want to use it as a co-processor, for experimenting with Genetic Algorithms, Neural Networks, cellular automata, etc, using open source or free development tools. The code I develop will be posted on my website or sourceforge.

Many boards I have come across include stuff for getting video or other data in and out of the board. I don't need this stuff. I just want 1 or more FPGAs and a reasonable way to communicate with the code running on the computer.

Embedded processors are not required, they would just be wasted space in the FPGA.

thanks

Bill

Reply to
Bill Burris
Loading thread data ...

For PCI you have a variety of open source IP cores, most notably the PCI bridge on opencores. For PCIe I'm not aware of any free core.

Perhaps Enterpoint's PCI board could be interesting for you? It seems to be very cheap and does not include any of the features you say that you don't need :)

formatting link

Otherwise, if you really need PCIe, one of the cheaper solutions might be to buy a PCIe based board with an FPGA that includes a PCIe core in hardware. I'm not sure if you can get one of those for less than $500 though.

As for windows device drivers, I can't say anything since I'm mostly a Linux user myself.

/Andreas

Reply to
Andreas Ehliar

Another option is the PEX 8311 from PLX Technology -- it's a single-chip PCI-E bridge that looks like it takes a lot of the pain involved in PCI away. Like you, I don't want to spend a lot of money on a core, and for my current project (which is GPL'd) I don't want to depend on any non-Free IP, even if it is zero cost. The chips from PLX are expensive -- in some cases they cost more than the FPGA that you'd want to hook up to them.

My group has considered developing a logic-dense (think lots of spartan-3s) PCI-E board for experimenting with some of the various applications you've mentioned, but getting boards cut, populated, and debugged makes every project at least a $5k one -- so it's unlikely to be in your price range.

Keep in mind too that, for the really "interesting" stuff, you don't generally need to physically touch hardware. We did all of our studies with wavelet compression in FPGAs without ever touching hardware. The synthesis and sim tools are all available cheap and run under windows, and generally let you learn far more about what your code is doing than the physical hardware would.

...Eric

Reply to
jonas

HI Bill, Our Raggedstone1 product would seem to be a good fit for your requirements being one of the biggest logic intensive boards you can by cheaply, as a side note we are in the final stages of cutting a PCI core that will be shipped Free with Raggedstone1 to use with your board you purchase. We are getting a driver written for windows also to use.

REGARDS IAN

Reply to
Ian Muncaster

This sounds like what I should be doing. Once I know what I am doing, I can start thinking about what hardware to use. I also have an Avnet Spartan 3E Evaluation Kit and an Opal Kelly Spartan 3 board, which I use for instrumentation applications. These boards will also work for testing FPGA programs. When I get to the point where I need to move stuff back and forth faster than the USB can handle I will think of getting something like the Raggedstone1. If I spend my money on a computer, I can convert the old one to a Linux box, eliminating the need for Windows device drivers.

Bill

Reply to
Bill Burris

ElectronDepot website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.