Which board to buy?

raqib · ‎06-01-2012

Hey guys,

I just completed my first course in Digital Design. The course provided a brief introduction to FPGA's I am very interested in learning more and was thinking of buying a FPGA board to play around.

I bought Circuit Design with VHDL(1st Edition) by Volnei A. Pedroni and I found it pretty easy to follow along.

Could you guys suggest which board to buy? What board would be the best to start with?

Thanks alot

c_oflynn · ‎02-24-2009

The Avnet Microboard S6 (http://www.em.avnet.com/en-us/design/drc/Pages/Xilinx-Spartan-6-FPGA-LX9-MicroBoard.aspx) must be one of the best deals around. The board itself has a fair amount of features that let you do some pretty advanced projects. Plus it comes with a license for ChipScope which is handy and normally costs $$$ (the license you get is locked to the device). See http://www.newae.com/tiki-view_blog_post.php?postId=17 for a quick review of using ChipScope on that board. Ontop of that you get a device-locked SDK, which lets you build applications for the soft-core processor! So there is tons you can do with this board because of the extra license you get. Even though it's not the absolute cheapest board around, it will keep you busy for a long time!