BrownBear1968
Junior Member level 1
I´ve read a closed topic called Want to make a FPGA board. It was an interesting discussion.
I am also interested to develop a low-cost FPGA development board but some of its features are distinct from the one purposed on the closed topic.
Why I am interested to build a low-cost development kit if it is easy to by several kits under US$ 75? Importation taxes. The final price is inacceptable for some students.
Can´t my institution buy a set of development kits for the students? Yes, but we are facing hard time in terms of the government finnancial support. Probably such times will last more a few years. As a solution, we are requesting for the students to buy their own development kits. For ARM-microcontrollers it is very easy to find, but for local, stable, several-bug-free, development kits FPGAs, I didn´t find any one.
There are three target audiences.
The first one is for digital electronics first contact students (combinational, sequential & FSM). Push-buttons, leds, sliding-switches, and four seven-segment displays are enough for the practices, IMHO. Obviously for this case and the following ones, an usb-jtag interface is needed to download the bitstream.
The second one is for intermediate students (ULA & memory-based, discrete CPU based-systems). A bank-memory is also needed to implement these basic systems. I am alson thinking about a LCD, but I will try to avoid it to mantain a low-cost goal.
And the third one is for (what I call) advanced students: FPGA-based acceleration reconfigurable systems. Such systems are composed of: usb interface for data exchange; soft processor (Nios, MicroBlaze, etc) to process the send/reception of data; and a reconfigurable VHDL-based reconfigurable data specific to accelerate some application; and the already mentioned.
We already have a BGA welding machine at our institution.
Considering my goal, I kindly request some comments about you, guys. Advices, references, links, tools, etc.
Regards
I am also interested to develop a low-cost FPGA development board but some of its features are distinct from the one purposed on the closed topic.
Why I am interested to build a low-cost development kit if it is easy to by several kits under US$ 75? Importation taxes. The final price is inacceptable for some students.
Can´t my institution buy a set of development kits for the students? Yes, but we are facing hard time in terms of the government finnancial support. Probably such times will last more a few years. As a solution, we are requesting for the students to buy their own development kits. For ARM-microcontrollers it is very easy to find, but for local, stable, several-bug-free, development kits FPGAs, I didn´t find any one.
There are three target audiences.
The first one is for digital electronics first contact students (combinational, sequential & FSM). Push-buttons, leds, sliding-switches, and four seven-segment displays are enough for the practices, IMHO. Obviously for this case and the following ones, an usb-jtag interface is needed to download the bitstream.
The second one is for intermediate students (ULA & memory-based, discrete CPU based-systems). A bank-memory is also needed to implement these basic systems. I am alson thinking about a LCD, but I will try to avoid it to mantain a low-cost goal.
And the third one is for (what I call) advanced students: FPGA-based acceleration reconfigurable systems. Such systems are composed of: usb interface for data exchange; soft processor (Nios, MicroBlaze, etc) to process the send/reception of data; and a reconfigurable VHDL-based reconfigurable data specific to accelerate some application; and the already mentioned.
We already have a BGA welding machine at our institution.
Considering my goal, I kindly request some comments about you, guys. Advices, references, links, tools, etc.
Regards