Recommend a FPGA

[Loki726]

I've been using an Altera UP2 series FPGA as part of a digital design class I'm taking this semester. After working with these boards for a couple of months, I would like to have something similar for use of real time signal processors or maybe even design as a simple cpu. However, the current board I am using now is limited to about 70k gates and maximum clock of about 5mhz.

So I'm wondering if there are some FGPA's that people have had good experience with. Here is what I am looking for.

Good software package (easy to program in vhdl, intuitive graphical interface, etc)
VGA output
LCD or LED display
Max clock speed over 50Mhz (for reasonable circuits)
Enough gates to hold something similar to an early pentium (around a million or more)
Reasonably priced (under $500 including software and accessories)
At least 32Mb of ram

 

[djhuber82]

I've never used them, but I've heard the Xilinx Spartan series is a good low cost FPGA. You can get 1M gate parts for ~$80 or 1.5M gate parts for ~$120 through www.digi-key.com. Looks like Xilinx has some free development software called ISE WebPACK, just don't expect it to be convienient to use or for it to produce anything very fast. If you only want to do real time signal procesing, then a much cheaper option would be to get a small FPGA or MCU to handle LCD display, etc. and use a programable DSP chip for the real work. This approach should also give you much higher speed operation (for a given budget). I can't recomend any particular parts, but TI is the reigning DSP king so start there if you decide to go that route. Good luck!

PS- I almost forgot: the PIC16C92X is a good, cheap MCU family to consider for LCD applications. It has an integrated LCD controller, free development environment (if you don't mind coding in ASM), and a programmer can be bought online for ~$100. I used one for a small lighting controller project and it worked great.

 

[blahblah99]

Originally posted by: Loki726
I've been using an Altera UP2 series FPGA as part of a digital design class I'm taking this semester. After working with these boards for a couple of months, I would like to have something similar for use of real time signal processors or maybe even design as a simple cpu. However, the current board I am using now is limited to about 70k gates and maximum clock of about 5mhz.

So I'm wondering if there are some FGPA's that people have had good experience with. Here is what I am looking for.

Good software package (easy to program in vhdl, intuitive graphical interface, etc)
VGA output
LCD or LED display
Max clock speed over 50Mhz (for reasonable circuits)
Enough gates to hold something similar to an early pentium (around a million or more)
Reasonably priced (under $500 including software and accessories)
At least 32Mb of ram

FPGAs aren't really good for audio processing unless you are doing parallel audio processing. Their integrated MAC units are much much much slower than the ones built in DSPs. BUt if you insist on an FPGA for audio processing, try the Spartan 2/2e/3 series, with up to a million gates or more.

 

[helpme]

I've been using the Virtex 2 Pro series from Xilinx as part of my Senior Project. It's decently sized, 30K Logic Cells, a bunch of 18x18 multipliers, and has two PowerPC 405 processors embedded in it.

I'm actually using Microblaze 'soft' processors instead of the PPCs, but they still run at a decent rate (100 Mhz). My AES encryption core also runs at a good clip, 106 Mhz.

You can get a good dev board with tons of attached stuff from Digilent. (http://www.digilentinc.com/info/XUPV2P.cfm)

If you don't need the 18x18 blocks, PPC405s or any of that attached hardware (audio in, etc), the Spartan-3 devices that were suggested are just as good. There are dev boards for the spartan-3 that have similar peripherals hanging off of it too.