need help picking an FPGA kit

[OS]

I need pointers where to buy an FPGA kit to play with and for school projects.

 

[BrownTown]

Well I would say first you should make a list of what you want to be able to play with in terms of I/O and power of the FPGA and then pick whatever is the cheapest that has all that. At my school we use the Altera DE2 board alot which has shit tons of I/O and a relatively powerful mid range FPGA, but its somewhere north of $500 even for the student discount.

 

[FirstBlood]

Try Xilinx's Spartan 3 family. They have starter kits from ~200$..

 

[wwswimming]

i worked about 9 years at a digital radio R&D facility with about 500 other engineers.

they use a LOT of Xilinx FPGA's.

i'm not sure what year you're in, but if you get a summer job at a wireless company,
they could probably help you get price breaks on stuff for your home lab.

 

[Lord Banshee]

I love altera FPGAs as it is the only ones i've used but this FPGA kit with a Xilinx fpga for $99 have been calling out to me, it might be for you too 🙂

http://www.digilentinc.com/Pro...ucts&Nav2=Programmable

 

[FirstBlood]

It also depends on the type of "school projects" you're planning on doing. I'm doing some DSP work, and the Spartan3 is awesome...

 

[Leros]

We used the Spartan 3 in my digital logic circuits class. Maybe it was just because we had old machines, but the software to program it was horrible.

 

[OS]

thanks guys, what software do you usually use to interface, is there a standard or common suite?

The funny thing about this is I've taken a verilog/hdl class, so i know some of the theory and how to write code, but somehow i didn't take the associated lab to do the hands on stuff, and i still got my BSEE. :X

 

[lambchops511]

http://www.knjn.com/board_dragon.html