Mohammed,
I use two
B5-Spartan2+ boards from Tony Burch in Australia. They have worked flawlessly
so far.
You have to
work out a few things before you pick a board.
1. Speed of
device required if you wish to run it fast say 100+ mhz, some boards use -5
devices which are
slower than -6
so be careful on this one. I think there are -7 devices and maybe -8 out but
I've not really
bothered with
them as my -5 device boards run sweet at full 100mhz so I'm happy (for
now).
2. The number
of I/O pins you require to be able to connect to. Some boards bring all the
pins from the FPGA
out to headers,
some do just the I/O and Power pins whilst some just give you a token few to
play with.
3. The amount
of gates in the device. Most boards feature a 200K gate FPGA now so this
should do any new
designs unless
you are planning a huge complex HDL design?
4. Also be
careful about how the boards need to be programmed, some of them require you
to buy a special
cable which can
cost $100+ just for the cable!
I would
recommend looking at the following for good quality 'learner
boards'
There are
boards available for the faster, more I/O pins or more gate count FPGAs but
the price increases
when your
requirements do.
Paul
PS Does anybody
know offhand just what max speed a -5 is supposed to be able to do. I don't
imagine putting the
100mhz clock
into a x2 DLL and then running off this will be too likely to succeed! But I
would like to know for
future
reference, I'm too busy to sit and download all the Spartan2 manuals off
the Xilinx site. ;-)
I have seen the
DDR SDRAM controller is recommended to use a -6 spec FPGA but it didn't give
anymore details.
Can a -5 do a
133mhz SDRAM interface or would I be limited to 100mhz
version?
Sorry Guys I'm new to this but I want to get on
track as fast as possible.
what kind of Kits would you use for trying and
testing your designs for ASIC or FPGA, ofcourse you don't go to the foundry
for each new idea ?
Paul
?