Sensible starter FPGA board

Is

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a sensible thing to buy as an introduction to working with FPGAs? If not, can you recommend anything else at the same kind of price with no-charge development tools?

The parallax board seems to be reasonably priced, has a Stratix core so you get the DSP components and the large memories, lots of header pins to connect to externals (DRAM is presumably impractical on a breadboard, for signal-integrity reasons and the difficulty of putting

184-pin sockets on a breadboard if nothing else, but I can't see why SRAM and an ADC or DAC wouldn't work).

Is it at all conceivable to get VGA out of something like that, or would the signals degrade hopelessly on their way from the headers to the 15-pin plug for the monitor?

Tom

Reply to
Thomas Womack
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Has some very nice inexpensive platforms. These are used for universities, colleges, and schools. They are inexpensive enough that a student can buy a simple one for about the price of a textbook.

Aust> Is

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a sensible

Reply to
Austin Lesea

No, according to

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you can still get a XC2S50 or XC2S100 board for $149 or $249 respectively. Or are you claiming they just keep the Web site up to mislead passing travellers?

The difference between the XESS and the Parallax board is basically the choice between interesting peripherals and on-board large memories and multipliers; whilst DSP trickery sounds fun, I suspect it would probably be more sensible to get the board with peripherals to start with.

Tom

Reply to
Thomas Womack

Austin,

you better re-check XESS offerings, as ASFAIK they have dropped __all__ low cost Xilinx boards.

Antti

Reply to
Antti Lukats

Thomas Womack wrote in news:Hxu* snipped-for-privacy@news.chiark.greenend.org.uk:

Yes, we continue to make and sell these boards and will for at least a few more years. Last year we halted production of some boards based on the older XC9500 CPLDs and XC4000XL FPGAs after the boards passed their five-year product lifetime.

You can always use distributed arithmetic to commit DSP trickery. Multipliers are sexy and easier to use right out of the box, but DA is still a handy technique to know and understand.

--
|| Dr. Dave Van den Bout   XESS Corp.                 (919) 363-4695 ||
|| devb@xess.com           PO Box 33091                              ||
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Reply to
Dave Vanden Bout

You could try

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James Momrrison Hardware Designer NDI

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Reply to
James Morrison

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401/884-7930 Fax 401/884-7950 email snipped-for-privacy@andraka.com
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Reply to
Ray Andraka

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something like D2E + DIO1 boards The board has vga out.Haven't tried vga on mine yet.

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Or whatever their newest equivalent is. D2SB + DIO5

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OR if a smaller fpga is fine

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Looks like they are finally getting the boards out they've been talking about for a while.

Pity they went for 6 pin for the jtag.If it had been 20 pin, could have made it a debugger(for micros) as well.

Or the other one is

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Wonder when his Altera board is going to be out ?

Alex

Reply to
Alex Gibson

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