Good Dev Board

[gordon sumner]

I'm looking for a good FPGA dev board. My budget is not low, but
since I'm a grad student it's certainly not high. The primary
requirement is that I need gates, and lots (>1M) of them. I've had a
good experience with an XC3S500 board (Digilent) but my research is
pushing me further. In my world gates for dedicated resources don't
count (unless they can be commandeered for my own use) because I need
to create machine descriptions that are as "portable" as possible.
Any suggestions?

 

[Jonathan Bromley]

On Wed, 3 Nov 2010 06:10:44 -0700 (PDT), gordon sumner
<olgordy@gmail.com> wrote:

I'm looking for a good FPGA dev board. My budget is not low, but
since I'm a grad student it's certainly not high. The primary
requirement is that I need gates, and lots (>1M) of them. I've had a
good experience with an XC3S500 board (Digilent) but my research is
pushing me further. In my world gates for dedicated resources don't
count (unless they can be commandeered for my own use) because I need
to create machine descriptions that are as "portable" as possible.
Any suggestions?

Actel has a ProAsic3 dev board with a 1.5M-gate device on
it, which may be interesting because it's a fine-grained
architecture with few dedicated structures apart from RAM
blocks and PLLs. But at a glance I thought the board
was quite expensive for what's on it. You can upgrade
to a 3M-gate device on the same board, which is good;
but there's almost nothing by way of peripherals,
which means quite a lot of do-it-yourself work.

If you're going all-out for portability, it might not be
a bad choice. Certainly an alternative to the usual
big-name LUT-based architectures.
--
Jonathan Bromley

 

[d_s_klein]

On Nov 3, 6:10 am, gordon sumner <olgo...@gmail.com> wrote:

I'm looking for a good FPGA dev board.  My budget is not low, but
since I'm a grad student it's certainly not high.  The primary
requirement is that I need gates, and lots (>1M) of them.  I've had a
good experience with an XC3S500 board (Digilent) but my research is
pushing me further.  In my world gates for dedicated resources don't
count (unless they can be commandeered for my own use) because I need
to create machine descriptions that are as "portable" as possible.
Any suggestions?

If I understand what you are looking for (A whole mess of gates to
verify some RTL), I would suggest getting a 1 or 2 generation old
board, like a Virtex-4 or a Stratix-2.

You are not going to be able to clock these as fast as current boards,
but you will get a lot more gates for the money.

These show up on eBay fairly often, or you can get them direct some
times. Be sure to ask about the student discount if you're buying
direct (you may have to get a faculty member to register with the
university program.)

$.02,
RK

 

[Bryan]

Check out Xilinx' University program boards, most of which are from
Digilent:
http://www.xilinx.com/products/boards_kits/university/index.htm

The Genesys and XUPV5 provide two Virtex-5 options with very good
Academic pricing. You'll find Virtex-5 performance is much higher
than the Spartan you've been using, as well as the 6-input LUT gives
you more synthesized logic per cell than the 4-input LUT.

Genesys
$449
XC5VLX50T
28800 6-input LUTs/FFs

XUPV5
$750
XC5VLX110T
69120 6-input LUTs/FFs

Bryan

 

[Brian Drummond]

On Wed, 3 Nov 2010 06:10:44 -0700 (PDT), gordon sumner <olgordy@gmail.com>
wrote:

I'm looking for a good FPGA dev board. My budget is not low, but
since I'm a grad student it's certainly not high. The primary
requirement is that I need gates, and lots (>1M) of them. I've had a
good experience with an XC3S500 board (Digilent) but my research is
pushing me further. In my world gates for dedicated resources don't
count (unless they can be commandeered for my own use) because I need
to create machine descriptions that are as "portable" as possible.
Any suggestions?

http://www.enterpoint.co.uk/oem_industrial/hollybush2.html

Spartan-3A DSP-3400 which means a fair few gates, and a lot of Block Rams and
DSP blocks.

- Brian

 

[John Adair]

Also have a look at Raggedstone1, Raggedstone2, Drigmorn3, Drigmorn4.
Links to product pages for these and others http://www.enterpoint.co.uk/boardproducts.html.
We operate a student and university discounts on all of these
products.

John Adair
Enterpoint Ltd.

On Nov 4, 8:43 pm, Brian Drummond <brian_drumm...@btconnect.com>
wrote:

On Wed, 3 Nov 2010 06:10:44 -0700 (PDT), gordon sumner <olgo...@gmail.com
wrote:

I'm looking for a good FPGA dev board.  My budget is not low, but
since I'm a grad student it's certainly not high.  The primary
requirement is that I need gates, and lots (>1M) of them.  I've had a
good experience with an XC3S500 board (Digilent) but my research is
pushing me further.  In my world gates for dedicated resources don't
count (unless they can be commandeered for my own use) because I need
to create machine descriptions that are as "portable" as possible.
Any suggestions?

http://www.enterpoint.co.uk/oem_industrial/hollybush2.html

Spartan-3A DSP-3400 which means a fair few gates, and a lot of Block Rams and
DSP blocks.

- Brian

 

[Anssi Saari]

gordon sumner <olgordy@gmail.com> writes:

I'm looking for a good FPGA dev board. My budget is not low, but
since I'm a grad student it's certainly not high. The primary
requirement is that I need gates, and lots (>1M) of them. I've had a
good experience with an XC3S500 board (Digilent) but my research is
pushing me further.

If you like Digilent, they have (mostly) the same board with a S3E1600
which is considerably larger, for $225.