buying FPGA Board????

[buts101]

but which one???

I'm 4th year student doin electronics engineering. I like to learn to handle and program FPGA devices but my campus has no such device. So I'm will insist my campus to buy one deives. But myself being begineer in it, I don't know a lot about FPGA. I heard some development board of Xilinx and other too.

Please help me to understand the FPGA devices and its importances and recommend me which FPGA board should I insist my campus to buy.

Looking forward for your help.

Thank you.

 

[samcheetah]

well, i will highly recommend the Altium LiveDesign Evaluation Kit

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or you can choose the famous Xilinx Spartan-3 Starter Kit

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the good news about the Xilinx Kit is that now it comes bundled with the CPLD Design Kit for the same price.

both these kits are priced at $99 (excluding taxes and shipping charges) and both have only evaluation versions of the softwares that are needed to program these boards.

there is also the upcoming Xilinx Spartan 3E Starter Kit

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this looks like a really nice kit. but it is expensive than the above two ($149) and i think it isnt available yet so nobody has used it. but if you know about FPGA design, that wont be a problem.

now, the reason that i chose the altium kit over the xilinx kit is that at the time when i was hunting for a nice kit, the xilinx kit didnt come with the CPLD kit and the second reason is that the altium kit comes with a XC3S400-4FG456C whereas the xilinx kit comes with a XC3S200-4FT256C. and the altium kit has more features than the xilinx kit such as the onboard DAC and speakers etc.

so the choice is yours!

i hope that helps