Need advices on FPGA board for professional development

[sidir]

Our lab plans to buy a FPGA board for professional development. We have some experiences on Nios board already. And we feel that it is somewhat small, suitable for starters. So we want to buy a board with larger FPGA chips and more supports for high performance embedded computing and signal processing. Which board should we buy? How about Altera stratix vs Xilink spartan? Thanks!

 

[videohu]

It depends on your requirements, I think it is better to list your requriements and ask the technique support from Xilinx and Altera. They will give some some details about their solutions.

 

[bittware]

Provided you had owned a nios board, you must obtain the quartus II license and be familiar with its working style. So why invest extra money and learning energy on Xilinx board with ISE? I recommend you to buy Stratix based board.

 

[sidir]

bittware, you are right. Your advice remind me of the troublesome procedure to get workable licenses from the distributor. Thank you!

 

[maruvatan]

Hi, I think the question was more of device functionality rather than the s/w involved.
I have used both quartus 2 and Xilinx ISE. I find them both user friendly, easy to learn and click-and-go type (though I would not recommend doing just that!). Its equally important to know what you are implementation is and to get familar with the system functionality, logic/memory requirements. Assign proper clocks, and follow banking rules.
I would recomment choosing board with FPGA which has PowerPC, in-built transceivers, RocketIO. I have seen a Xilinx FAE demo a development board with flash mem, USB interface, RS232 , GbE ethernet, DDR interface and have it running in just 5 mins.
have a look at their offerings **broken link removed**

 

[lockerman]

Try to look at
www.celoxica.com

 

[shakalaka]

Go for Virtex-II family....

 

[omid219]

Go for Virtex II family and if you want to have a developement board to implement hi-density design with embeded processor, I suggest to use ARM developement board.