Looking for starter FPGA kit

[EElink]

Hi, I'm new here. I was looking for a good starter kit. One thats not to expensive. I found this one on ebay. Its the Altera Cyclone 2 development board for a $100 used. Is this reasonable? Also coming from Micro controller design how different is FPGA design. I know the language is diff. Are there variety of projects online for FPGAs like there are for microontrollers? Thanks!

 

[mrflibble]

This list is a nice starting point: https://www.joelw.id.au/FPGA/CheapFPGADevelopmentBoards

Also check out the $25 icestick: https://www.latticesemi.com/Products/DevelopmentBoardsAndKits/iCEstick.aspx

 

[ads-ee]

Make sure you understand FPGA design is different than Microcontroller design (SW) as the point of FPGA design is creating hardware that can and does run in parallel. So unless you design sequential HW VHDL/Verilog your code won't behave in quite the same way you're used to when writing C/C++ etc for a Microcontroller.

e.g.
If you see a line of code like this:

count <= count + 1;

You should think of something like this:


Because if you make the mistake like so many before you have made you'll put that counter inside a for loop and end up with a massive blob of logic and will be asking us why ISE/Quartus-II/Vivado says the design's max frequency is 10 MHz when you need it to run at 150 MHz.

FYI, for loops in HDL code will be completely unraveled into hardware (i.e. if you loop for 10 times you'll have logic for each of the 10 loops being generated)

BTW don't make outputs of registers into clocks to reduce the clock frequency to some lower value, instead use that output to generate a clock enable pulse and keep the number of clocks you use to a minimum.

Regards