Need a FPGA board - a little

[Dave_PL]

Need a FPGA board - a little bit more expensive one

Hi,

I would like to buy an evaluation board. Im interested (so far) in implementing some audio/video processing algorithms. In the future it could be some projects connected with wireless communication.

I am considering two boards from Digilent:
- Virtex-5 OpenSPARC Evaluation Platform


- Genesys Virtex®-5 FPGA Development Kit


Ive chosen Digilent cause theyre offering academic prices which is kinda sweet imo.

To be honest I have no idea about OpenSPARC so I don't know how usefull it would be.

I would appreciate for help which board to choose (or maybe you suggest some others). The maximum price is 750$.

Regards,
Dave

 

[Dave_PL]

Cmon people. ANY help is appreciated

 

[farhada]

Hi Dave_LP,
I would also go for the digilent one. The price is great and you get a HUGE fpga for a very low cost.

Don't worry about the OpenSparc, this is just what they support which means the FPGA has enough resources to handle the Sparc Soft Core integration.

Best regards,
/Farhad Abdolian

 

[allsey87]

If your interested in video processing algorithms a softcore processor like openSparc, Microblaze etc etc will be a heavy performance penalty.

If you want to do video processing, stick with a dedicated ASIC processor (probably something based on the arm core) and run **broken link removed**.

If you need to work really, really fast, then implement what your after directly on the FPGA without a processor.

A nice little compromise which I'm currently working with for a robotics project is the APF27. This has a freescale i.MX27 (based on the arm core) and spartan 3A FPGA (contains 16 18bit dedicated multipliers) on a single reasonable cheap board. not to mention the FPGA is directly on the processor bus allowing 16 bit * 100MHz data flow...

The i.MX27 processor also has a whole lot of hardware multimedia codecs, check out the i.MX27 Product Summary Page

Cheers, Mike

 

[farhada]

I don't think the board you mention can be used for anyone who wants to implement audio and video algorithms inside an FPGA in a high level language. 200k gates is not even large enough to implement the MP3 codec, unless you are thinking about making a product and use the FPGA only for some general purpose IO and things like that.

We did some video compression and de-compression on V5 330, I am not sure if this could fit inside a 110 but for the price indicated, the digilent board is well worth a try.

Cheers,
/Farhad