FPGA Development tool xilinx or Altera

[ep.hobbyiest]

i m very new to FPGA. which development board will be suitable for me to start.
whether from xilinx or altera?
And also it should be of low cost.

 

[mrflibble]

This list of cheap fpga dev boards is a good starting point: https://www.joelw.id.au/FPGA/CheapFPGADevelopmentBoards

 

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low cost then you should buy a spartan/cyclone board, both Xilinx and Altera have them listed on their web sites for versions that are under $100 like:

https://www.xilinx.com/products/boards-and-kits/AES-S6MB-LX9.htm
https://www.altera.com/products/devkits/partners/kit-terasic-de0-nano.html

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This list of cheap fpga dev boards is a good starting point: https://www.joelw.id.au/FPGA/CheapFPGADevelopmentBoards

very nice list of board...I've been looking for a Zynq board to play around with and the Parallella are quite a bit cheaper.

 

[mrflibble]

Yeah, the $119 parallela looks pretty sweet. Zynq 7010 + 16 core cpu + gigabit ethernet gives some nice possibilities. Only reason I haven't bought one yet is to keep the Cool New Projects counter in check. ;-)

 

[ep.hobbyiest]

Yeah these are very nice things. i m very new to fpga so is Zynq 7010 + 16 core cpu for beginners.?

 

[mrflibble]

That's a good question, to which I don't have an easy answer. Depends on the beginner in question I suppose.

I mean there are people that I would not trust to open a can of sardines that was already open. And then there are people you can assign a difficult new task with a reasonable expectation of a good result a few weeks later. Sooo, how are your sardine can opening skills?

Anyways, if this is your first fpga ever then you will be spending quite a bit of time getting the hang of the toolchain and how to write something synthesizable in general. A zynq will be a steeper learning curve than say a spartan-6, simply because there are more moving parts. As in beside the fpga fabric you now also have an embedded arm core in there. It's not going to be rocket science, but it is simply going to be more. Same "more stuff to learn" argument goes for that onboard cpu.

That said, I think that specific board is good value for money. If you are up for the learning curve then go for it. If you want to play it safer then you could get a cheaper fpga only board to see if it's your kind of thing.

Another nice option that is not on that list is this one: https://www.latticesemi.com/icestick

Obviously less powerful than the zynq board, but only $25 and easily available at mouser/digikey/etc. Really all depends on your budget in terms of time & money. Well, and your intended goal. But I was more or less guessing it was "learn about fpga's".

Oh and the lattice tools for that icestick also come in free evaluation flavor, same as for xilinx/altera.

 

[m_c]

I was in the same boat as the OP a few weeks ago, and I ended up with a Lattice MachXO2 Pico board.

I did consider Xilinx, however they wouldn't let me register with my usual googlemail email to download their software (they want a 'corporate' email address), so I gave up with them, and nobody actually recommended any Altera Dev boards at the time.
A couple people mentioned the MachXO2, so I opted for the Pico dev board as that was the only dev board available in the UK that had a decent header at a cheap price, however unless you want to play with the Pico board features, I would recommend trying to get the more standard MachXO2 Breakout Board (part no. LCMXO2-7000HE-B-EVN) as it's got LEDs onboard (the Pico has no LEDs!) and lots more pins are broken out to headers.

One thing worth mentioning, is during my 'How the f*** do you get this thing to do anything' stage, I did stumble across https://www.fpga4fun.com/ which have some pretty good articles covering the basics along with some good examples if you want to learn Verilog, however they sell a mix of Xilinx and Altera boards via their other site https://www.knjn.com/. You might find a suitable dev board there if you're set on Xilinx or Altera.

 

[ep.hobbyiest]

Yeah LCMXO2-7000HE-B-EVN having less price but it don't look like for development board.
Zynq 7010 + 16 core cpu is bit costly but it has every thing on board for learning.
i m looking from both side for learning purpose and cost also.

 

[ep.hobbyiest]

How is the SPARTAN 3A Family?

 

[ep.hobbyiest]

Hello is the following development board is good for beginners
**broken link removed**

means in terms of burning configuration in fpga and peripherals need.

 

[TrickyDicky]

What peripherals do you need?
If you wanted to do some ethernet work - then this would be pretty useless.
But for VGA and Audio - looks like you can do something with it.

 

[mrflibble]

XC3S50A is a tad small, but then again it's only $30. Depends a bit of what your goals are.

 

[ep.hobbyiest]

I am just beginner's and at the beginning my goal is to just the learn fpga neatly and then i will go to next stage.

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I have doubt about this development regarding program burning in the fpga.
there is usb and jtag too.
then which is good to use?

 

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Most boards use an onboard USB to jtag uart, so you don't chose. Just plug the USB cable into you PC and the dev bed and install the cable driver.