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buy a development board to learn vhdl and verilog on a target CPLD or small FPGA

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joseMiguel

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Hi guys,

I would like to buy a development board to learn VHDL and Verilog, on a small target CPLD or FPGA.
Could you advice to me a developement board based on Xilinx or Altera even Lattice chip.

my budget is around 50€.

I already have bought microcontroller based board on ebay.
but as i am unemployed i don't have an account on distributors.


Thank you for all


Regards

Jose Miguel J.
 

joseMiguel said:
Hi guys,

I would like to buy a development board to learn VHDL and Verilog, on a small target CPLD or FPGA.
Could you advice to me a developement board based on Xilinx or Altera even Lattice chip.

my budget is around 50€.

I already have bought microcontroller based board on ebay.
but as i am unemployed i don't have an account on distributors.


Thank you for all


Regards

Jose Miguel J.
Click to expand...

Hello Miguel,

about a year ago I had been started with "Elbert V2" form "Numato Labs". I liked this board very much (Xilinx Spartan 3A), but it FPGA has only 1400 LUT (after short time it is too little for projects. So few months ago i bought second board "Mimas V2" from Numato (with Xilinx Spartan6). These boards satisfy all my needs:

https://numato.com/product/elbert-v2-spartan-3a-fpga-development-board

https://numato.com/product/mimas-v2-spartan-6-fpga-development-board-with-ddr-sdram

Regards
 
If your ultimate objective is to learn VHDL and Verilog then using ISE is probably not the way to go. ISE hasn't been updated since the last version 14.7 (~2013). The ISE parser has no official support for SV or VHDL 2008. Basically you will have to restrict yourself to Verilog 2001 and VHDL 2000/2.

If you get an Artix, Zynq, or Spartan 7 board you can use Vivado, which has significant SV support (2015.x or above) and VHDL 2008 support. All of these tend to be more than your 50 euro request, but then your experience using the tools, parts, and language will be up to date.
 
Speaking for Xilinx FPGAs...

As mentioned above, it makes sense to work with Series7 FPGAs for which the IDE needed is Vivado (Webpack version is free). Also any dev board containing Series7 FPGAsis near to or more than 100 Euros.

Are you a student?
If so, then you can avail the varying discounts offered by vendors such as Digilent on different boards.

Else if you are strict on budget, you can go for a Xilinx Spartan series dev kit.
 
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I can recommend you an Arty A-7 board from Digilent. It works with recent Vivado, there is an on-board DDR3 memory, you can easily expand it by using PMOD modules with ADCs, DACs, LEDs, displays etc. But if you are limited with the cash you can learn VHDL/Verilog for free by simulating everything in the simulation tools (ModelSim Altera Edition is for free, Vivado simulator as well). I own that Arty board but now I program it only when simulated design works OK..
 

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You will have to increase your budget. For that price you may be able to get old Spartans and cyclone FPGAs but my advice would be to go with #5. In addition to arty you also have other 7 series fpgas available at digilent. I'm not up to speed on intel fpga's, but it may be interesting watching that space.

If you got budget for a processor and budget for fpga, you may want to consider a €100 euro fpga-processor hybrid that can give you both (zync for example) Otherwise if you get a big fpga you can emulate a processor internally.
 
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