
How to choose an FPGA dev board. A guide for 2020 - blackSparrow
https://thedatabus.io/fpga-buying-guide
======
rektide
My hope is we see io put to better use. Frankly DisplayPort is one of the
best, most useful, easiest to use, highest bandwidth connections you can get,
with a streams based architecture that supports many manners of interesting
use. It seems OT to my following comments, is indeed pretty apes to oranges,
but still one of my weirder but better hopes for ways we get fpga & other
systems talking interestingly cheaply atop existing everyday consumer tech,
which seems to be required for costs to be earthly & useful for integration.
Go more open (no licensing fee & flexible) specs.

FMC tends to be big bulky & stupid expensive. PMOD is great for interfacing
microcontroller shit, but this is FPGAs we are talking about. Throughput
monsters with high speed serdes & rather fast regular io. These two
longstanding options put you at a high very expensive end, or a pretty so so
low density low data rate low cost end.

Which is silly. Everyone & their uncle is trying to push better high density
connectors. Almost none have a community around them.

Very small & not a big community, but one example of an active much denser &
higher throughput, there is syzyg.

[https://syzygyfpga.io/](https://syzygyfpga.io/)

Also just a about out to the incoming io specs. There's a very big win when we
can get better at stitching together systems & cxl, ccix, opencapi, & gen-z
are each massively compelling new io/coherency systems.

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brandmeyer
> I strongly suggest completely disregarding anything to do with the processor
> for your first few projects and use only the FPGA part of the device.

I cannot disagree more strongly. Working with a hybrid software+logic project
will teach you so much about both the similarities and differences between the
two worlds.

CPU+software+fabric DMA+logic accelerator == win

~~~
blackSparrow
If you're talking about people who already know atleast one of digital design
or firmware design (writing bare metal drivers etc) then your advice makes
sense. But if I were a beginner trying to understand how digital logic design
works, the whole Processor + Programmable logic and the complex interfaces
between them can overwhelm me and take me away from exploring the base digital
logic that is implemented. It will be a much more enjoyable experience to
create something in the programmable fabric first and then think about how you
can interface it with normal software.

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ncmncm
Funny that it doesn't mention the wide variety of very cheap prototyping kits
from Crowd Supply -- including Fomu that fits entirely in your USB socket.
FPGA kits on CS start at $15.

My disappointment with the FPGA world is how stuck it is in the "emulate an
ASIC" rut. These things, physically, could change their whole logic and
connectivity design on the fly according to instantaneous requirements, but
everybody assumes you have to load them up once at reset and leave them that
way. Each switch-point setting is just a flip-flop, no different from any of
the ones in the LUTs.

Manufacturers enforce this treatment by providing only serial access to the
switch-point settings in their tooling, but there is probably a lot of room
for more flexibility, at least in some.

~~~
blackSparrow
I'm all for cheap stuff for beginners but what good is an fpga board without a
lot of peripherals? I mean the whole point of dumping your design into an
actual fpga is to see it doing something. If I were just learning to desing,
doing so would be very much possible in the software tools itself, if I'm able
to succesfully go upto bitstream generation without errors and meet timing, it
means my design is going to work on a physical board too. I'm open to changing
my opinion on this though.

~~~
ncmncm
There are also cheap peripherals, as daughter boards or integrated. See for
yourself.

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blackSparrow
This article aims to guide you in your search for a suitable FPGA development
board which can often lead to you pulling your hair out!

~~~
christoph
I’ve only just got into FPGAs thanks to the Mister project, thankfully the
people in charge of that project made a good choice for me. What they’ve
achieved with the DE-10 nano to me is some sort of tech voodoo and I’m not
easily impressed these days. £100 for the board and £30 for an SDRAM chip and
I’m in retro gaming nirvana everyday. I’ve got a pocket sized, low power
device that nearly boots instantly, pretty much perfectly plays every old
machine from the the Spectrum up to the NeoGeo and GBA. RGB and VGA output,
works with my Arcade stick, DS4, SNES/NES classic controllers, etc. Anyone
with any interest in retro gaming who hasn’t yet dipped their toe in the water
I urge you to give it a go. It’s probably the most exciting and vibrant open
source community I’ve immersed myself in for many years.

~~~
bb88
A lot of the old silicon created in the 80's are unobtanium -- particularly
certain chips in the Amiga hardware line.

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bb88
> DO NOT fall into the 'Write code in C++/Python and run it on FPGA' trap. A
> lot of youtubers seem to be promoting stuff like that for beginners these
> days which is just sad.

Yeah, I'm not a big fan of this statement. Imagine if people said in
programming, "Don't fall into the Rust/Python/.NET trap. Use Java."

~~~
blackSparrow
Well comparing the FPGA world to the programming world cannot get any
meaningless. If you read up about the state of HLS tools as of today, you will
find enough experts telling you that they're nowhere near finding actual use
in the industry, most of them only end up taking away the control you have
over the design and all of them use way more resources when implemented than
HDLs.

On the other end you have beginners asking stupid questions like 'okay how do
I print hello world using python on this FPGA?' instead of thinking about the
digital logic design that goes into it. Which is why I discourage the
beginners from using anything but HDLs.

If anything HLS can be a good tool for professionals who already know what
they're doing and understand what they're giving up by using an inherently
sequential (programming) language to model inherently parallel hardware. They
are in a position to use it as a tool to rapidly prototype their design and
make incremental improvements thereafter, not beginners.

~~~
bb88
> If you read up about the state of HLS tools as of today, you will find
> enough experts telling you that they're nowhere near finding actual use in
> the industry, most of them only end up taking away the control you have over
> the design and all of them use way more resources when implemented than
> HDLs.

> On the other end you have beginners asking stupid questions like 'okay how
> do I print hello world using python on this FPGA?'

And why is it not simple? Dogma? Industry standards? Drinking the FPGA vendor
kool-aid?

What's wrong with having "print('hello world')" run on a micropython running
on a risc V core on an FPGA? Because that's not an optimal solution? Are you
serious? To me that seems like an awesome first step.

~~~
blackSparrow
The first thing one needs to understand is that FPGAs are highly specialised
tools. They're only used in cases where extraordinary performance is required,
more than what processors can provide, just because there are tools nowadays
that let you print hello world doesn't mean it's a good idea. The entire
thought process behind digital design is very different from that of
programming.

~~~
bb88
Whether or not that's a valid critique, it puts you as a gatekeeper to who can
or cannot learn what an FPGA can do.

Sorry, I believe knowledge should not have gatekeepers.

