Comparison of Entry-Level (aka cheap) FPGA boards
A while ago I decided I wanted to play around with a FPGA – Field-Programmable Gate Array, basically it lets you design new hardware ICs (Integrated Circuits), without needing a multi-billion dollar chip fabrication plant. So I set out to research the available pre-made development kits I could play around with. They’re quite a bit more expensive to get into than microcontrollers (where you can buy a $3 chip and build a programming cable out of some old scraps of wire), so I looked for the least expensive boards that still had a decent set of features.
I ended up making a comparison chart of FPGA development kits, like I said this was over a year ago, so it may be a bit out of date, but the low-end of FPGA’s doesn’t move all that fast. Most of the information is still valid, but you might be best to do some research yourself before you take the plunge. I only considered boards that featured FPGAs from Xilinx and Altera, since I found other vendors are not competitive in the low-cost arena (low-cost was the most important feature to me at the time, I didn’t want to spend $5000 just to play around. And yes, there are $5000 development boards).
If you’re curious, I ended up getting the DE2 (with the educational discount). It costs a bit more, but it has significantly more features, such that I’ll probably never run out of stuff to play with.
The ones highlighted in green are the ones I feel provide the best value, and just coincidentally fall at the $50, $100, and $150 price points.
wow dude long ways away from SinCity
makin robots..
Comment by Trusty AKA EMP — May 20, 2009 @ 6:58 pm
Nice roundup. I am surprised that the price is still that high for all of them even with a student discount. I would have thought that there would have been at least one almost giving it away to gain student engineer traction.
Comment by Alan Parekh — October 10, 2009 @ 3:22 am
Well there’s the $50 one on the cheap end. But FPGA’s are really quite expensive compared to say microcontrollers (where you can get a pretty powerful chip for just a couple bucks). Just the chip alone on the $50 board would run you about $20, then you have to consider the cost of the PCB (generally they are all at least 4 layers, much more expensive than a 2 layer PCB), and all the other peripherals like USB controllers, external memory, etc etc. The chip alone on the $150 DE1 runs about $60-70, plus it’s got a ton of other things on the board.
Comment by davr — November 5, 2009 @ 9:27 am