
Cheap FPGA Development Boards - homarp
https://joelw.id.au/FPGA/CheapFPGADevelopmentBoards
======
tverbeure
I can't let a topic like this pass by without mentioning commercial (often
obsolete) FPGA-based products that are repurposed as development boards. They
usually offer FPGAs with much higher capacity for rock bottom eBay prices.

* Pano Logic G1 board: [https://github.com/tomverbeure/panologic](https://github.com/tomverbeure/panologic)

* Pano Logic G2 board: [https://github.com/tomverbeure/panologic-g2](https://github.com/tomverbeure/panologic-g2)

* Colorlight 5A-75B: [https://github.com/q3k/chubby75](https://github.com/q3k/chubby75)

* Cisco HWIC-3G-CDMA: [https://github.com/tomverbeure/cisco-hwic-3g-cdma](https://github.com/tomverbeure/cisco-hwic-3g-cdma)

Playing with these has been a fun hobby of mine and while I have a box full of
'real' development boards, I usually find myself going back to the Cisco board
for my personal projects.

~~~
postalrat
Comtech AHA363PCIE0301G might be a future option. They are cheap but I don't
think anyone has reverse engineered it yet.

~~~
tverbeure
I reverse engineered that one partially as well, and somebody has been able to
get to an LED blinky.

However, it has the issue that Intel recently took down Quartus 11.0, which is
the last version that supports these FPGAs.

~~~
ATsch
Unfortunately nobody seems to be working on foss toolchain for those either.

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tyingq
If you need 5V compatibility, or large sizes for cheap, search eBay for
[altera university]. Since these boards were mandatory for many classes there
are pretty easy to find for under $50, and include lots of peripherals,
buttons, LEDs, connectors, etc. The cheap ones are old, of course, but still
useful.

~~~
metaphor
> _If you need 5V compatibility..._

The devil in the details is that when 5V-tolerant I/O are naively configured
as such, device reliability drops like a rock. You'll likely find this
disclosed in the manual fine print. Something to consider when prototyping a
design destined for production.

~~~
baybal2
What do people need 5V for these days?

~~~
justinclift
External stepper motor drivers. eg:

[http://leadshine.com/ProductSubType.aspx?type=products&categ...](http://leadshine.com/ProductSubType.aspx?type=products&category=stepper-
products&producttype=stepper-drives&subtype=general-stepper-drives)

~~~
baybal2
Driving a stepper directly from FPGA? Why?

~~~
justinclift
Seemed to be more a question of "why 5v at all?", rather than meaning FPGA-
specific. ;)

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nkatsaros
I recommend the Terasic DE10-Nano. Because of the MiSTer
([https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Main_MiSTer/wiki](https://github.com/MiSTer-
devel/Main_MiSTer/wiki)) project, a cottage industry has formed around addons
for this board which makes it a good choice for hobbyists who may want
additional peripherals.

~~~
snvzz
It's a great board to run miSTer on, but it got no symbiflow open stack
support.

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IgorPartola
I have always been curious about FPGAs and I think I understand the concept,
but what could someone provide some use cases for why you might want one (that
aren’t calculating SHA-1 hashes)? As someone who understands microcontroller
programming and wiring, what cool things could I do with an FPGA that I would
have a hard time doing with other hardware?

~~~
rthomas6
Most things you can do with a custom ASIC chip you can do with an FPGA, except
with slower clock speeds. High speed signal processing, massive parallel
designs, custom anything pretty much. You can (and often do) even have
processors inside the FPGA running software. Some real world applications
include a lot of video encoding and processing, cellular stuff, electronic
warfare and radar applications, self driving cars, and other high bandwidth
and high speed custom data processing. Basically if you need a custom chip but
don't need 10 million of them, FPGAs are a good choice.

~~~
IgorPartola
Thanks. So like what do hobbyists use them for? Like why would you buy one to
mess around with? And what is electronic warfare?

~~~
seabird
There's not much there for hobbyists past toy ISA design and basic digital
logic design exercises unless you really stretch the definition of hobbyist.
It's a steep increase in learning curve for power that most people will never
use.

Electronic warfare is most commonly the disabling of enemy radio frequency
equipment (radar, communications, targeting, etc).

~~~
IgorPartola
Got it. So it sounds like this post is more for people looking to build
products and choosing which FPGA to base them on.

~~~
seabird
A lot of people believe that the year of the "maker FPGA" is upon us, and that
the only thing holding it back is bad vendor tooling, so there's a lot of HN
posts about them as of late. The vendor tooling _is_ bad, but more than
anything, the use case just isn't there.

Given, this is just my opinion on the matter, so take it with a grain of salt.

------
amelius
So which company is the most open-source friendly provider of FPGA chips these
days?

~~~
b1ackb0x
FPGA tools allow a lot of customization if you need it, what difference will
it make if they are fully opensource? FPGA chip design isn't opensource anyway

~~~
bXVsbGVy
The vendors tools are notoriously buggy, don't conform to the HDL standard and
lacks support to inference of some functional block (cascade DSPs and FIFOs
for example).

Some FPGAs features are only available on yearly paid subscription. Also, the
license is very restrictive, publishing benchmarking is not allowed,
therefore, there is no public information on how to chose a computer to have
faster synthesis.

Other than solving those issues, an open source framework enable the
researches to search for newer place and route algorithms; enables new HDL
languages to target the actual hardware instead of using verilog as
intermediate language.

------
ThrowawayR2
Seems out of date. For example, it links to Digilent's retired Zybo board
instead of the current version.

~~~
AlbertoGP
When I saw the Parallella ([https://parallella.org](https://parallella.org))
listed there I thought that it must be a very old list, but it turns out that
it’s still being sold at least by Digikey.

The page is updated though, as can be seen in the edit history with the link
at the page footer:
[https://joelw.id.au/FPGA/CheapFPGADevelopmentBoards?action=d...](https://joelw.id.au/FPGA/CheapFPGADevelopmentBoards?action=diff)

As of this writing, the last update was on 2020-07-20.

I’ve sent an e-mail to the author pointing him to this discussion in case
other corrections get posted here.

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ur-whale
My favorite ebay FPGA board vendor is QMTech.

Cheap, well made,large choice, decent documentation.

[edit]: they also have an aliexpress store.

~~~
CamperBob2
Putting in a plug for ZTex as well
([https://www.ztex.de](https://www.ztex.de)). Not the cheapest but far from
the most expensive, and they publish full schematics. Stefan Z.'s support is
first-rate in my experience.

------
b1ackb0x
There are cheap Virtex-6 and Kintex-7 boards as well ~$100-$150 on Aliexpress.

~~~
duskwuff
The gotchas with those are that:

1) The boards are very bare-bones. Most of the I/Os are tied up in high-speed
connectors like PCIe or SFPs, which will be very difficult for a beginner to
work with.

2) The Virtex/Kintex parts they're using require a paid (or pirated) Xilinx
license, and the sheer size of the parts makes compile times even slower than
normal.

~~~
b1ackb0x
1\. I/O isn't that bad, 40-100 GPIOs out, pretty much on par with most Artix-7
boards out there, SFP and PCIe is a plus cause Artix chips have no/slow
transceivers and simply can't use them, and well everything aside from
tutorials aren't beginner thing on FPGAs

2\. License is pain though, you can get a proper demo license for Kintex
probably

3\. Compile times for barebones projects are few times more for a larger
FPGAs, but as you add IPs and stuff they take a few minutes on a fastest
computer anyway

------
rudedogg
Whenever I look for an FPGA board I keep ending up on
[https://www.crowdsupply.com/tinyfpga/tinyfpga-
ex](https://www.crowdsupply.com/tinyfpga/tinyfpga-ex). The campaign hasn't
been updated in over a year though.

Is the project dead, or is there something better out there I should look at?

~~~
neuro_mnem
Check out ulx3s [1], it's a quite an impressive open source dev board with
lots of features, based on the same ECP5-series FPGA chip.

[1] [https://www.crowdsupply.com/radiona/ulx3s#details-
top](https://www.crowdsupply.com/radiona/ulx3s#details-top)

~~~
rudedogg
Thanks, that one looks great.

------
npendleton
[https://groupgets.com/manufacturers/good-stuff-
department/pr...](https://groupgets.com/manufacturers/good-stuff-
department/products/orangecrab) Open source by the talented Greg Davill

------
andromaton
It says 512GB SRAM for the EDGE Artix 7 FPGA Development Board. It should say
512KB SRAM.

------
ColanR
What I never see mentioned are cheap FPGA dev boards that don't come with any
peripherals. I guess those aren't worth the pain of adding the peripherals
back on?

~~~
contingencies
[https://www.sparkfun.com/products/14829](https://www.sparkfun.com/products/14829)

------
jcfrei
I'm curious: Would it be worthwhile porting the entire stack required for
http(s) (tcp/ip, ssl, etc) to an fpga? Would it be faster than running it on a
CPU?

~~~
nv-vn
Disclaimer: not an FPGA expert

I think really any task can benefit from being ported to FGPA, but FPGA clocks
tend to be slower than CPU clocks and large logic will force you to lower the
clock as components become more spread out on the chip (assuming all the logic
elements needed even fit on your board). The caveat is that it's expensive to
do things in hardware, and some things are already designed very well -- if
you need to design a whole CPU from scratch on an FPGA to run your code it'll
obviously be slower, but it will also take way too much time to get it
anywhere near real world performance per clock. Since TCP/IP and SSL are
mostly pretty specialized, the answer is yes. If you're interested, there's
some open-source projects that do part of this
[https://github.com/fpgasystems/fpga-network-
stack](https://github.com/fpgasystems/fpga-network-stack))

