Can I build an FPGA kit? Need your suggestions plz

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ahmad_abdulghany

Joined: 12 Apr 2005
Posts: 1369
Helped: 212
Location: Cairo, Egypt

29 Mar 2006 15:18 build your own fpga board

Hello,
You may know that there's a varity of microcontrollers programmers, kits, and manyother test boards and whatever for many types of microcontrollers that can be built, however there're many other kits for microntroller sold everywhere,

But, for the FPGA, I never see any kit circuits or shematics that are ready to build by your own, Am i right? Can any one provide me some kits that can be built with lower cost than other kits in market?

Thanks in advance,
Ahmad,

Shread

Joined: 12 Jan 2005
Posts: 16

29 Mar 2006 20:45 Can I build an FPGA kit? Need your suggestions plz

You aren't rigth! There are a lof kits for FPGA and CPLD, that you can copy yourself. For example Xilinx Spartan 3 Starter Kit. Search the oficial web site of xilinx for "Spartan-3 Starter Kit", and you will see this page: http://www.xilinx.com/products/boards/DO-SPAR3-DK/reference_designs.htm

ahmad_abdulghany

Joined: 12 Apr 2005
Posts: 1369
Helped: 212
Location: Cairo, Egypt

29 Mar 2006 21:34 Re: Can I build an FPGA kit? Need your suggestions plz

Shread wrote:

You aren't rigth! There are a lof kits for FPGA and CPLD, that you can copy yourself. For example Xilinx Spartan 3 Starter Kit. Search the oficial web site of xilinx for "Spartan-3 Starter Kit", and you will see this page: [url]h**p://www.xilinx.com/products/boards/DO-SPAR3-DK/reference_designs.htm[/url]

I am happy that i wasn't righ! I really want to build my own kit, but i don't know about standard specifications and capablilities of FPGA kit, can someone summerize them?

Regards,
Ahmad,

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Iouri

Joined: 17 Aug 2005
Posts: 687
Helped: 79

04 Apr 2006 16:53 Can I build an FPGA kit? Need your suggestions plz

Why do you need to build the kit?? Might be it whould be better to learn about FPGA from somebody else kit, besides building the PCB it very costly.....

Regards,

acdoering

Joined: 04 Apr 2006
Posts: 3
Helped: 1

04 Apr 2006 22:35 Re: Can I build an FPGA kit? Need your suggestions plz

Not only the PCB is costly,
also soldering the chip is more and more difficult.
Now even with lower pin number, the packages have very fine pitch.
Furthermore, modern FPGAs need several supply voltages,
some are very low but must be of very low resistence.
This is difficult to do, and until you have done it, a newer cheaper device will
be on the market.
The only true reason for doing a board yourself is, if you need
special periphery that you cannot connect with a connector,
such as very high speed optical interface, low noise AD/DA converters,
lots of fast memory, etc.

Some of the xilinx kits are cheaper than you can by the single FPGA for.

Andreas

pnowe

Joined: 04 Apr 2006
Posts: 2
Helped: 1

04 Apr 2006 22:48 Re: Can I build an FPGA kit? Need your suggestions plz

I agree with the other people who have posted here. It is getting more and more difficult to build your own FPGA board. The fine pitch surface mount parts are making it very difficult. I have done one myself and it cost >$500 for the PCBs, parts and assembly. The manual assembly of the board took 16 hours!! That is one of the reasons that I decided to offer the assembled board for sale (assembled professionally of course). $149 gets you the board, cables, LCD display, CD-ROM with appnotes, datasheets, etc. Check out www.dulseelectronics.com for the finished board. Another option is the $99 Spartan 3 board from Xilinx.

Not only is it cheaper to buy a finished board, you also know that it will work out of the box. So, whether you go for a board from Dulse Electronics or Xilinx or someone else, I highly recommend buying an assembled board.

Phil

gliss

Joined: 22 Apr 2005
Posts: 670
Helped: 61
Location: Boston

04 Apr 2006 23:38 Can I build an FPGA kit? Need your suggestions plz

You don't really need to build kits boards for FPGAs. FPGA's are user reconfigurable. The chips themselves are the custom part. So you can use a general purpose FPGA board and use the I/O how you please.

For custom boards, that would be nice, but it's very expensive in terms of time and money.