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There are now a wide array of development kits to suit all levels of budget and performance requirements from the manufacturers themselves, or from third-party companies specializing in development kits and board design. With the FPGA manufacturers being proactive in providing design software on the web (often for free for noncommercial purposes), it has become much less of a hurdle for engineers to obtain access to both the design tools and the hardware to test out their concepts.
One of the major advantages with the modern development boards is that they tend to have an FPGA device that can generally handle almost all the major building blocks (processors, display drivers, network stacks) even on a relatively low-end device. The beauty of the boards too is that with the development of multiple layer PCB designs, most of the common interface elements can also be integrated on a very small board. With both Xilinx and Altera supporting credit card sized boards, these are well within the reach of students and engineers on a very small budget. Mid-Range boards are also available for more lab based usage, such as the DE series of boards from Terasic, based around the Altera FPGA devices, starting with the credit card sized DE0-Nano, DE0 and continuing up in power and complexity. An excellent starter board, for example, is the DE0 board, which is slightly larger than its DE0 successor, but perhaps a little easier to use in terms of access to switches and plugs. This board has two 40-way GPIO (General Purpose Input Output) connectors for general interfacing, a VGA output, PS/2 input, Ethernet, USB, SD Card socket and a selection of LEDs, switches, and buttons. This board is shown in Figure 2.6. There is a series of boards available for the Xilinx FPGAs, with similar ranges of options with an example being the Nexsys 3™ board from Digilent ® which has a similar range of IO capability to the Altera based boards. The Nexsys 3™ board is shown in Figure 2.7.
With such an extensive range of options and prices, it is now a matter of choice in many cases which platform to use. Each one will have its strengths and weaknesses, and the designer is able to select the device and board to develop their own design, taking into account their own requirements and constraints.
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Product Categories: Embedded - FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Array)
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