How about this for a beginner: Spartan-3 FPGA Starter Kit?

[saryee]

fpga beginner

Spartan-3 FPGA Starter Kit Board by Digilent/Xilinx

The kit comes with a Spartan-3 FPGA development board, a Starter Kit User's Guide, ISE (Integrated Software Environment), ModelSim Demo (for test benches), and lots of other demos and user information. Let us tell you about each...

Spartan-3 FPGA Development - 200,000-gate XC3S200 FPGA in a 256-ball thin Ball Grid Array package XC3S200FT256 with the following peripheral components:

4-digit 7-segment display

8 switches

4 pushbuttons

8 LEDs

VGA, PS2, RS232 ports

Clock sources

Flash

and Expansion connectors

The user's manual is very good at specifying the board and providing programming information.

An Introduction to Programmable Logic book is included which walks you through the Spartan-3, ISE tools, and Modelsim to build a traffic light application. This gets the user into the board and thoroughly ready to go. You learn about the libraries, schematic entry in place of writing VHDL, etc.

This kit is so easy to set up with your PC and parallel port, and the tools are easy to use, that you can spend a few hours and come out pretty wet on the whole VHDL/FPGA design, synthesis or simulate, and test cycle. The kit is well worth the money.

 

[usman]

best fpga starter kit

Assalam o Alaikum!
yes the said kit is best for educational purposes, and a initiative for the novice users. i am also working on that kit and this is the complete board along with all the necessary pheripherals.

regards,
Muhammad Usman

 

[the_penetrator]

beginner fpga

This kit was a very good choice 2-3 years ago.

Now, with a mere $50 dollars more you can get a much "richer" board: Spartan-3E starter kit. It has much more memory AFAIK. S3SK has only 1Mbyte SRAM, while S3ESK has NOT flash (32mbit), SDRAM (16mbyte? i don't remember exactly)

BUT... check it out... IMHO it's more worth your money.

 

[Iouri]

spartan-3 starter kit expansion boards

It is doesn't really matter which kit you are picking. Xilinx has some Altera has lattice as well. Just make sure you have sufficient support ie friends colegues who is familiar with that paltform. Also you might want to wait before picking up the kit, use ModelSim or Active HDL to simmulate your designs and get more familiar with tools and design flow and when you are ready to make right dessison regarding the platform what you are going to use


Good lack