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Cheap FPGA Development Boards: What to look for

joelw.id.au

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Re: Cheap FPGA Development Boards: What to look for

#51

Post by Nzen »

tomjen3 wrote: post #8

My problem with FPGA is two fold - I have no idea what to use them for and I have no idea how to use them. Yet with all these mentions here I fear that I may become unemployable as a software developer if I don't keep up.

While researching contemporary intersections of encryption and databases (for a presentation), I learned about Microsoft's Cipherbase.[1] They made a dbms which uses an FPGA as trusted hardware that will decrypt db fields & perform the appropriate query. In my wild fantasy, I hope to recreate the ASIC for bragging rights.

Talking about ASICs, I'm surprised no one mentioned how the public heard of FPGAs in the last few years: bitcoin mining.

[1] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/cipherbase/

Re: Cheap FPGA Development Boards: What to look for

#52

Post by welterde »

jnbiche wrote: post #43
WasimBhai wrote: post #4

I strongly recommend Cypress PSoC3 and PSoC5 if your budget is tight and you want to achieve the blazing fast speed of FPGA within a tight budget. I implemented Wavelet Transform with de-noising scheme, a classifier model to match against that Wavelet Transform, and a RMS machine, all in hardware, all in that small PSoC3 chip. Magic.

The Cypress chips are amazing. And you can even buy a basic Cypress PSoC dev board for $5: http://hackaday.com/2014/06/16/cypress-launches-5-arm-dev-bo... Tragically -- as is the case with FPGAs -- the development environment only runs on Windows. I really think these companies are missing out on a large market segment of software developers who are increasingly interested in hardware, but who work exclusively on Lin…

Worse actually, since at least for Xilinx and Altera the development environment is available for linux.

Re: Cheap FPGA Development Boards: What to look for

#53

Post by deadgrey19 »

mng2 wrote: post #44
deadgrey19 wrote: post #34

I fear that this article misses out on one of the most important aspects of cheap FPGA boards, which is the software stack. Do not be fooled. There is no freeware, open-source, GNU, LLVM etc software in the FPGA world. You will need to use the manufacturers very own, proprietary, place & route (and often synthesis too) software. For this reason, go with Xilinx or Altera who both offer free versions of their developme…

Lattice does offer free licenses for the low end. They're certainly not going to give you a free license for PCIe; I'm pretty sure Xilinx and Altera don't either, that's still a premium feature.

I haven't used either in the last year or two, so a lot may have changed, although, in the past, many of the low end parts had a built-in (slow) PCIe Gen 1 block, so only wrappers were needed to use it, no licenses. IIRC, this was (one of) the problems with the Lattice board, because with no built in endpoint, you needed to license an expensive "softcore" PCIe block (or write your own...) The same is true of 1/10/40G MAC blocks.

Re: Cheap FPGA Development Boards: What to look for

#54

Post by aprdm »

I've made this post about cheap FPGA kits: http://www.embarcados.com.br/kitsdsvfpga/

You can check it out, it's in portuguese but the figures/names/prices are in english/dollars.

FPGAs should be used more often then they are. If you are doing a lot of things (or can do) in parallel, that's what you want a FPGA for.

Re: Cheap FPGA Development Boards: What to look for

#55

Post by IdleChris »

hippich wrote: post #26

Is there resources where people share their FPGA projects? I really like idea of FPGA but have hard time to find real world project for it to start my introduction with.

I have a personal blog (http://idle-logic.com/) where I fiddle with FPGAs. Lately I've been working with the DE0-Nano from Terasic (Altera Cyclone IV FPGA).

There is a lot of good information if you dig through the archive, but no big 'real world' projects to share yet.

For example, here is a crash course in FPGAs: http://idle-logic.com/2010/02/11/dissecting-the-cyclone-2-ha...

Re: Cheap FPGA Development Boards: What to look for

#56

Post by diamonis »

tomjen3 wrote: post #8

My problem with FPGA is two fold - I have no idea what to use them for and I have no idea how to use them. Yet with all these mentions here I fear that I may become unemployable as a software developer if I don't keep up.

Here's a nice use case example of using fpga to speed up an algorithm in a camera versus implementing in firmware.

http://wiki.elphel.com/index.php?title=FPGA_Development_in_E...

This wiki is a great resource for setting up a fpga tool chain on Xilinx.

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