FPGA Starter Kit Selection

[stigmatist]

Hi all,

I am new to FPGA design and want to purchase a starter kit. By the way I am not new to digital design so I want to purchase a kit that I can use later after getting basic knowledge on Verilog. I do not know for which applications I will use this board but I can build some project on DSP. I am in Turkey and one of my friends will get me a starter kit from USA and I have only one week to select the kit.

My budget is up to 250$ at most.

I am between NEXYS3 SPARTAN-6 FPGA BOARD and Spartan-3E Starter Kit. I am glad to hear any more suggestions.

Thank all of you for your help in advance.

Regards.

---------- Post added at 23:39 ---------- Previous post was at 22:37 ----------

One of my friends is using Altera DE0 but I am not sure about Altera since Xilinx is more common and I have little experience from my laboratory courses with ISE

 

[joelby]

You might be interested in this comprehensive list of Cheap FPGA Development Boards.

With your budget, I would go with a Spartan-6 board - probably the Digilent Atlys if you can get the academic discount (USD 199). It has a good range of interesting peripherals on board, is increasingly popular so there is a reasonably amount of community support for it, and you can get a wide range of fairly cheap "PMod" add-ons. Compared to the Nexys3, it adds HDMI input and output, gigabit Ethernet, DDR2 memory, and a much larger FPGA (which is always useful for DSP applications).

For development, I recommend buying the best board you can afford! I've got a big box of lower specced development boards that I've had to upgrade to fit more complicated designs to demonstrate this point.

I haven't had anything to do with Altera, but there certainly seems to be a wider selection of boards for Xilinx parts.