Best FPGA Dev Board For Application

[mack_g]

I am building a 16 bit computer and was wondering what the best FPGA dev board would be. I am at the stage where I have simulated my designs and would like to test them on hardware. For example I want to test my 16 bit multiplication block. The problem I see with the dev boards I have found is that they are very low IO count or they have too few logic blocks. For the testing I was also wondering if there are any arduino mega shields since I am looking for around 52-150 IO pins which fits nicely on a arduino mega.

[hamster_nz]

If you need 100+ pins for testing, you will find it very hard to get your test setup to work

If you want to do exhaustive testing, and are testing a multiplier, what I would suggest you do is make a test harness that will eventually grow to become something like this.

  running = 1  (LED status)
  total = 0;
  for a = 0 to 32767
     for b = 0 to 32767
        total = (total <<1) | (total>>32)
        total += a*b;   <<< Your test multiplier

  running = 0
  if total == magic then
      pass = 1; (LED status)
  else
      pass = 0;

(you have a program on a PC to generate 'magic')

It might take 2^32 cycles, but that is only an hour at 1MHz...

A CMOD-A7 (http://store.digilentinc.com/cmod-a7-breadboardable-artix-7-fpga-module/) might be a candidate, or an Lattice board like a "MyStorm BlackIce" if you want to use the (very fast, open source) IceStorm tool chain (http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/).

[rstofer]

If you really want 100 IOs, the ZTEX board has it:
https://www.ztex.de/usb-fpga-2/usb-fpga-2.01.e.html

There is also a Debug motherboard with switches and LED:
https://www.ztex.de/usb-fpga-2/debug.e.html

Smaller IO count but what seems to me to be the best 'starter' board is the Arty:
http://store.digilentinc.com/arty-artix-7-fpga-development-board-for-makers-and-hobbyists/

The Arty has a fairly large FPGA so it is unlikely you will run out of LUTs.  But it doesn't have much in the way of IO.

I only had a 32 channel logic analyzer so I used what is now an obsolete Spartan 3 Starter Board.  It had 3 50-pin headers.

Another thing to consider with Vivado and Arty:  You can implement an in-circuit logic analyzer.  This is VERY powerful.  You can probe just the components you want.

There's another way to skin the cat:  Implement a long SPI register and use it to send both operands and receive the result.  I was building an arithmetic unit like the PDP11-45 and I used a Blackfin board to grab the vectors and intended results from an NFS server.  The Blackfin would grab a vector, send it to the FPGA, read back the results and complain to the serial port if it didn't like the answer.  The reason for the horsepower of the Blackfin is that it had ucLinux and a full TCP/IP stack.  I could see where a Raspberry Pi would be the way to go today as long as the SPI packet can be arbitrarily long (or segmented).

The NFS server was running on my Linux box and that's where I generated and stored the vectors.  Kind of a long way around...

This SPI approach is a lot like JTAG without all the complications.  It works very well once you get it set up.  A few Python scripts (Raspberry PI) and you're good to go!  I suspect it could be done just as well with an Arduino.  Neither of these were available to me at the time I used the Blackfin.  I would probably go for the Raspberry Pi since it has a file system, a console terminal, SPI capability, a C compiler or Python interpreter - yup!  That's the way to go!

[ebclr]

Taker a look on this board

http://www.mouser.com/new/Lattice-Semiconductor/lattice-ecp5-boards/

[Mattjd]

I built a 64 bit processor on an Altera DE0, uses FPGA chipset (correct word?) EP3C16F484C6

Wrote all code in verilog, programmed the board in Quartus, and debugged it all using Modelsim Altera. Modelsim is a testbenching software, its a digital logic analyzer. You have to write the testbench (generate a clock signal and desired inputs) and modelsim will give you the timing diagrams.

[ealex]

FPGA tool-chains have some kind on logic analyzer integrated. It uses FPGA block ram / resources, but it's already there.
In Quartus II it's called SignalTap.

I don't know how much you can automate testing with them - they can run in one-shot or normal trigger but I've never looked at how / if they save each trigger data.

[legacy]

If you really want 100 IOs, the ZTEX board has it.
ztex.de/usb-fpga-2/usb-fpga-2.01

This boars looks interesting for me. The only point I am afraid with is the 8051 Cypress controller.

[rstofer]

If you really want 100 IOs, the ZTEX board has it.
ztex.de/usb-fpga-2/usb-fpga-2.01

This boars looks interesting for me. The only point I am afraid with is the 8051 Cypress controller.

The programming process works well but it is a bit convoluted in comparison to the Digilent boards.  The claim to fame, of course, is the number of pins brought to the connectors.  This is a really big deal if they are required.  Digilent used to have the Spartan 3 Starter Board with (3) 50-pin connectors and that board is really useful.

[firetooth]

Low Cost FPGA Development Board:
Posedge-One FPGA Develop Board
3D view:
http://posedge.ir/upload/posedgeOne3D.pdf
features:
- Xilinx Spartan6-LX9
- USB On-Board Programer (Full support with Xilinx softwares)
- 4 Mb SRAM
- USB 2.0 (Speed: 10 MB/s)
- 64 Mbit Flash memory
- 48 I/O
- 24 MHz Oscillator
Hardware guide:
http://posedge.ir/posedgeone_hardware_guide/

[AndreZheng]

 
Hi, please take a look at the QMTECH FPGA core boards. Most of these FPGA core boards have 108 user IOs. Regarding the LEs, the quantity starts from 6K LE to 35K LE which is sufficient for implementing any 16bit MCU.
https://www.ebay.com/str/ChinaQMTECH/
https://qmtechchina.aliexpress.com/store/4486047
https://www.chinaqmtech.com

[FlyingDutch]

Hello,

in my opinion the "Arduino MKR VIDOR 4000" is a good option. It has onboard "Intel Cyclone 10CL016" big FPGA, Microchip ATSAMD21 (Arm Cortex-M0+ processor) and WiFi chip. It can be "programed" in few ways (Arduino IDE, Intel Quartus and using HDL languages, and "USB Blaster" programer emulation on Cortex-M0, JTAG programer).
Very good value for money, and big Cyclone 10 FPGA.

See these links:

https://store.arduino.cc/arduino-vidor-4000

https://www.digikey.com/en/videos/a/arduino/arduino-mkr-vidor-4000--digikey-daily

Kind Regards