just some basic thing like implementing AND gate, OR gate and adders
which are start kit available
For a list of dev boards, see:
https://tristesse.org/FPGA/CheapFPGADevelopmentBoards
Personally I am rather partial to the Digilent boards since they offer good value for money IMO. If you're serious about this I would advice to get a recent fpga family. For example for xilinx, the price difference between spartan-3 and spartan-6 is such that you would be silly to use spartan-3 for your learning experience. I am not saying spartan-3 doesn't make sense for a new design, but I am saying that if you have to choose on what platform to learn I'd say pick the newer yet-still-affordable one. For one, I like the clocking resources on the spartan-6 a whole lot more than on spartan-3.
As for tools, like TrickyDicky pointed out you'll need the vendor tools. So either xilinx ise or altera quartus for the popular fpga posse. For simulation ... xilinx has it's own builtin simulator which I find adequate for most things. It does
not have as many features as say Questasim. As for Altera I vaguely recall that current versions of Quartus come with a bundled version of Modelsim, but not sure about that. I'll leave that to the Altera users. ;-)
And you'll have to pick a language to learn first. So either vhdl or (system) verilog. And depending on your history you may or may not want a better editor for your HDL editing. My personal current gripe is still the lack of decent refactoring and a whole slew of other SIMPLE stuff that you take for granted when coding C++ or java in eclipse or what have you, but those same rather basic features are not present in the more basic tools. Certainly xilinx ISE doesn't have that, and I am pretty sure that Quartus doesn't have that either.
Hell, if it turns out I am blind and Quartus
does have refactoring + a doxygen plugin for documentation (*) + good system verilog support for synthesis + UVM support I might just jump ship to Altera land.
(*) Or another good whatever it is to facilitate documentation. Doesn't have to be doxygen, I am not picky.
Anyways, I guess my point there is that if you are planning to do this for more than 1 lab project of your EE course then I recommend looking into a good way to document your HDL projects. So if you can find tools that support your documentation habit I'd say that's a big plus!
Oh, and ...
i prefer to go for xilinx products, but in that also there so many things
which is best for starting......
Personally I bought the Atlys board, but price/performance wise ... if you can get the
at academic pricing I would go for that one. For $119 it definitely has a nice collection of goodies.
The only reason for picking Atlys I can think of right now to justify the price difference is if you are planning to do a project involving HDMI. Or if you absolutely
need gigabit ethernet...