I have always been curious about FPGAs and I think I understand the concept, but what could someone provide some use cases for why you might want one (that aren’t calculating SHA-1 hashes)? As someone who understands microcontroller programming and wiring, what cool things could I do with an FPGA that I would have a hard time doing with other hardware?
Cheap FPGA Development Boards
41–50 of 62 posts
Re: Cheap FPGA Development Boards
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you need 5V compatibility... The devil in the details is that when 5V-tolerant I/O are naively configured as such, device reliability drops like a rock. You'll likely find this disclosed in the manual fine print. Something to consider when prototyping a design destined for production.
What do people need 5V for these days?
External stepper motor drivers. eg:
http://leadshine.com/ProductSubType.aspx?type=products&categ...
Re: Cheap FPGA Development Boards
#43I have always been curious about FPGAs and I think I understand the concept, but what could someone provide some use cases for why you might want one (that aren’t calculating SHA-1 hashes)? As someone who understands microcontroller programming and wiring, what cool things could I do with an FPGA that I would have a hard time doing with other hardware?
Most things you can do with a custom ASIC chip you can do with an FPGA, except with slower clock speeds. High speed signal processing, massive parallel designs, custom anything pretty much. You can (and often do) even have processors inside the FPGA running software. Some real world applications include a lot of video encoding and processing, cellular stuff, electronic warfare and radar applications, self driving cars, and other high bandwidth and high speed custom data processing. Basically if you need a custom chip but don't need 10 million of them, FPGAs are a good choice.
Re: Cheap FPGA Development Boards
#44I recommend the Terasic DE10-Nano. Because of the MiSTer ( https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Main_MiSTer/wiki ) project, a cottage industry has formed around addons for this board which makes it a good choice for hobbyists who may want additional peripherals.
It's a great board to run miSTer on, but it got no symbiflow open stack support.
Re: Cheap FPGA Development Boards
#45I have always been curious about FPGAs and I think I understand the concept, but what could someone provide some use cases for why you might want one (that aren’t calculating SHA-1 hashes)? As someone who understands microcontroller programming and wiring, what cool things could I do with an FPGA that I would have a hard time doing with other hardware?
Most things you can do with a custom ASIC chip you can do with an FPGA, except with slower clock speeds. High speed signal processing, massive parallel designs, custom anything pretty much. You can (and often do) even have processors inside the FPGA running software. Some real world applications include a lot of video encoding and processing, cellular stuff, electronic warfare and radar applications, self driving car…
Thanks. So like what do hobbyists use them for? Like why would you buy one to mess around with? And what is electronic warfare?
Re: Cheap FPGA Development Boards
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most things you can do with a custom ASIC chip you can do with an FPGA, except with slower clock speeds. High speed signal processing, massive parallel designs, custom anything pretty much. You can (and often do) even have processors inside the FPGA running software. Some real world applications include a lot of video encoding and processing, cellular stuff, electronic warfare and radar applications, self driving car…
Thanks. So like what do hobbyists use them for? Like why would you buy one to mess around with? And what is electronic warfare?
There's not much there for hobbyists past toy ISA design and basic digital logic design exercises unless you really stretch the definition of hobbyist. It's a steep increase in learning curve for power that most people will never use.
Electronic warfare is most commonly the disabling of enemy radio frequency equipment (radar, communications, targeting, etc).
Re: Cheap FPGA Development Boards
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks. So like what do hobbyists use them for? Like why would you buy one to mess around with? And what is electronic warfare?
There's not much there for hobbyists past toy ISA design and basic digital logic design exercises unless you really stretch the definition of hobbyist. It's a steep increase in learning curve for power that most people will never use. Electronic warfare is most commonly the disabling of enemy radio frequency equipment (radar, communications, targeting, etc).
Got it. So it sounds like this post is more for people looking to build products and choosing which FPGA to base them on.
Re: Cheap FPGA Development Boards
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's not much there for hobbyists past toy ISA design and basic digital logic design exercises unless you really stretch the definition of hobbyist. It's a steep increase in learning curve for power that most people will never use. Electronic warfare is most commonly the disabling of enemy radio frequency equipment (radar, communications, targeting, etc).
Got it. So it sounds like this post is more for people looking to build products and choosing which FPGA to base them on.
A lot of people believe that the year of the "maker FPGA" is upon us, and that the only thing holding it back is bad vendor tooling, so there's a lot of HN posts about them as of late. The vendor tooling is bad, but more than anything, the use case just isn't there.
Given, this is just my opinion on the matter, so take it with a grain of salt.
Re: Cheap FPGA Development Boards
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Comtech AHA363PCIE0301G might be a future option. They are cheap but I don't think anyone has reverse engineered it yet.
I reverse engineered that one partially as well, and somebody has been able to get to an LED blinky. However, it has the issue that Intel recently took down Quartus 11.0, which is the last version that supports these FPGAs.
Unfortunately nobody seems to be working on foss toolchain for those either.
Re: Cheap FPGA Development Boards
#50I'm curious: Would it be worthwhile porting the entire stack required for http(s) (tcp/ip, ssl, etc) to an fpga? Would it be faster than running it on a CPU?
This is what many load balancer or firewall appliances contain