Selection of Beginner MCU or FPGA based Development board

I recently started reading about the dev boards out there and I thought I should buy one to get some hands on programming experience with hardware rather than just simulating FPGAs on Xilinx. I am quite confused as to what would be a good development board I could use to start off programming and get used to the ARM architecture. Currently the boards that caught my attention were ARM based, Beaglebone black, Bemicro SDK, SOCkit by altera. Also, the DEO Nano FPGA Cyclone IV, the Digilent Basys2 Spartan 3a, the Spartan 6 based FPGA board.

(I already read through most of the related posts out there, but most of them were pretty old and did'nt really answer my question)

My question is, what platform is versatile and a little future proof in the industry for me to practice on? Is it a good idea to buy a board that has an FPGA as well as a MCU on the same board such the SOCkit. Or should I buy separate FPGA and MCU boards and try to interface them through serial or JTAG ?

Also, it would be great if any of you could suggest other products out there that might be better suited for me. I am looking to get some knowledge about MCUs and FPGA platforms that are currently popular in the industry.

I'm willing to spend up to 100$US on the board.

As I said, I'm a beginner with some background in Verilog programming and MSP430 launchpad programming. I don't yet know what specific application I'm going to use it for, but basically I will be looking up projects on the internet and tryout the different codes and see what does what. So it would be great to have a board with good documentation.

Hi sr2002,

You need to have at lease fairly clear objective before buying the hardware...if the purpose is only learning then any thing is fine but you want to make some project out of hardware you need to first define the requirements for the project at least at block level and then select the hardware accordingly.......what I will suggest you before buying the board is think about the projects and explore on Internet any of that sort of project is available or not.... What kind of hardware and software is used and so on.....

Good luck

milind.a.kulkarni said:

Hi sr2002,

You need to have at lease fairly clear objective before buying the hardware...if the purpose is only learning then any thing is fine but you want to make some project out of hardware you need to first define the requirements for the project at least at block level and then select the hardware accordingly.......what I will suggest you before buying the board is think about the projects and explore on Internet any of that sort of project is available or not.... What kind of hardware and software is used and so on.....

Good luck

Click to expand...

Hi Milind,

Well I did some projects to build a 32-bit RISC processor in the Xilinx IDE and simulate the outputs of various modules on Modelsim, Also I did the Soda-vending machine project, RAM module etc. But all these were just simulated on Xilinx, I never actually worked with a FPGA board. As for Microcontrollers, I used the MSP430 to project Servo motors, basically PWM based projects.

My plan, When I get the board was, to try to build a Multiplier, divider, maybe try to make a GPU like Parallel process program and see how I can experiment around with it.
Also, I was planing on using the MCU to fetch digital or analog signals and produce 8 or 16bit numbers which I could use the FPGA to receive and process.
These are some of the things that were on my mind.

I understand that the Beagleboard has a Linux OS and people say that it wont give me much control over the hardware, but more over high level programming in C, perl etc. But I felt it would be an easier option to start off with.
But I also, wanted to exploit the functionality of FPGAs and so dont want to be limited just to programming MCU boards.

Also, I'd just like to add. It would be really great if someone could help me understand the possibilities of buy MCU boards such as Beagle board. I am more interested in exploiting the hardware than, running a linux OS on the hardware like a regular computer and just doing high level programming. Will a FPGA be a better fit for such things? Which MCU will be a good fool proof option? So that I get to learn mainstream technology.

I am not sure about what is your requirement about MCU .....it is a very big word ...... Ok What I understand from your post are

1) You have very good exposure on FPGA, Verilog and ASIC related work....Also are did some simulation on this for some of the 'Module' that we say in the FPGA.....but not worked on any real time hardware.
2) You have also some exposure about MCU with 32bit processor and written some codes working for Stepper motor, PWM related projects.

So here is what I suggest....First of all take some project .... Let say you want to measure the Temperature and Humidity using Sensor available using micro-controller and display the measured reading on LCD display.... now you need to first make a block level understanding of the project and design the hardware from it..... and develop the tool chain to write the code and generate the program out of it and program the code in MCU and look for you are getting expected output.....

Look in this way what is that you want to do ? ..... One need some requirement like this to look for the MCU based hardware ..... Like in about project you need ADC convertor as a by default requirement for your MCU ..... As most of the sensor give the output in analog form and you need to convert it in to digital to display on LCD using MCU....

I just expressed my thought on what you probably need to do......I hope this help you to get clear idea about decide your requirement....

Hope this helps.....

Good Luck

Okay, here is one of the projects that I am thinking of.

Function of the MCU: Interface with LCD to display two 4-bit numbers. Provide out put for a two 4-bit constants stored in a register.
Function of the FPGA: Serve as the Function unit and give output back to the MCU to display on the LCD.

So basically, use the MCU to give the OP-Code directly to the function unit built on the FPGA, to do logic or simple shift operations.
I was thinking of starting off with two 4-bit numbers.
It sounds pretty ambitious to me, what kind of hardware would be necesary for this?

My ultimate goal is to actually build a 16 or 32 bit RISC processor on a FPGA using Verilog.

My professor said, that spartan 3 boards wont have sufficient gates for hosting entire processors and stuff.

What combination of FPGA and MCU boards would be the best for this purpose? (Except Arduino)

If you are using FPGA (spartan 3) series why don't you explore micro-blaze with that ..... Micro-blaze is the processor core given by Xilinx itself.....

Good luck