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Not exactly a dev board, and $500 price bracket, but possibly more practical for many: http://redpitaya.com/ If you want to interface with the real world it is great to get something where the analog part is done well. All the low level stuff already works.
I wish I knew what this person was using them for :-) Has anyone made a similar comparative study of my biggest gripe with FPGAs: the quality of the (more or less mandatory) development software? In my experience, it's pretty horrendously terrible :(
Yeah, tools from hardware vendors are notoriously awful. Embedded debuggers (JTAG) are almost always terrible, too.
Its a good article in general with one very minor error. It explains you want on board LEDs and switches because its too easy to screw up soldering your own. The core reason why you want LEDs and switches on a FPGA board, why you'd buy included or solder your own, is too often during debugging this will be your UI. So you are in a quandary about which of several PLL designs to implement. Its not 1990 anymore, you've…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I worked w/ FPGAs exclusively for 5 years and still don't have many ideas for using them. (In other words, small ARM computers running Linux are more exciting. And low-power boards like the JeeNode etc) Actually an interesting arch for me would be small FPGAs together w/ an ARM system, where the FPGA would handle the fast interrupts, buffering things, and communicate w/ the processor when its ready.
Theres Zynq which combines an ARM core with an FPGA. The Parallella board contains one I believe ( http://www.parallella.org/ )
Very similar to Zynq but from altera rather than xilinx
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.
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.
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.
I can think of a few uses for FPGA:
* Pedagogical. When I was an undergrad, I took a computer architecture course. We wired up a simple computer with breadboards and discrete logic. The computer was microcoded to execute a variant of a modern ISA. The computer was useless and slow, but you learned a lot about computer architecture. I think this exercises is properly done with FPGAs these days.
* High-speed VLSI design simulation. You can simulate large designs at partial speed in circuit with FPGAs before you fab. I have no personal experience with this, but I'm guessing big chip design companies like Intel buy a lot of FPGAs for this purpose.
* Interfacing to high-speed data interfaces. Say you're building a hardware board with SATA, HDMI, or a high-speed ADC, but the microprocessor on your board doesn't support that interface natively. You can use an FPGA to connect that interface to the rest of the system.
For example, bunnie's Novena laptop has an FPGA with a high-speed IO connector. He has connected this to a high-speed DAC to create a homemade oscilloscope.
* High-speed DSP. Modern FPGAs have distributed DSP blocks. For example, the Xilinx Artix-7 100T can do nearly 1TMAC/s. So if you want to do video or audio processing, an FPGA might be a good solution.
I briefly looked into building a board to combine two video streams into one with barrel distortion for the Oculus Rift. An FPGA is perfect for an application like this.
I got interested in FPGAs a few years ago out of a desire to design a toy processor for a Coursera class. I had a similar issue figuring out what board(s) to get, mostly because I didn't know what the number of gates could actually implement. I too ended up with an Atlys board, which is an impressive little beast. When it came to learning an HDL, I got in contact with several people who worked on FPGAs and learned th…
The only project I'm aware of that has made progress on reverse engineering the Xilinx bitstream is fpgatools:
https://github.com/Wolfgang-Spraul/fpgatools
It only works with a Spartan-6 LX9, and then only has partial support (e.g. no block RAM). I'd be interested in hearing about other projects like this if you're aware of them.