Comprehensive list of FPGA development boards | Hacker News Reader

Comprehensive list of FPGA development boards

fpgadeveloper.com

76 pointshomarp26 comments

Am I missing something about the definition of the word "comprehensive"? How can you call a list comprehensive and ignore Altera/Intel? Last I checked they were the biggest FPGA player in town. I have three devkits within arms reach that aren't on this list.

And Lattice

And Gowin. During semiconductor shortage it became one of the last FPGA ICs with 9k LUT that are still in stock in form of very affordable development boards (eg. TANG NANO 9k)...

After Intel took over Altera, the focus has switched primarily to Data Center processing. Just look at both AMD/Xilinx and Intel/Altera websites and you can see a big difference. If you are a Data Center Engineer than Altera is probably a good match. But AMD/Xilinx has a more diverse focus, specifically video, robotics and AI inference. Altera and Xilinx were about 50/50 competitors for many years and I think that was always healthy competition. Now that they've both been bought out, the future of FPGAs was very tenuous. In my opinion AMD has done a much better job at maintaining and even improving FPGA technology.

But I agree this list in not completely comprehensive without Altera!?! Also, I don't see the Kria boards...

This list really limits itself in terms of Xilinx price-to-performance by disallowing anything with a SOM. You can get a combined SOM + Carrier board with https://www.xilinx.com/products/som/kria/kr260-robotics-star... that's going to crush most things there despite being relatively affordable.

Amazing, these are actually in stock:

https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/amd-xilinx/SM-K26...

Very good price for Zynq Ultrascale+

Agree, the SOM + Carrier board is the only thing that makes sense unless you are doing some large scale production making a million high end boards. The SOM's have suddenly made it possible for small scale or even independent bedroom projects to make use of high-end SoCs! KR260 / KV260 are both great boards.

As an alternative, here's my list of cheap FPGA development boards: https://joelw.id.au/FPGA/CheapFPGADevelopmentBoards . It covers a bunch of other vendors.

Aside from that. It intentionally does not include any SoM/Carrier card combo even though it seems like everyone is going to that.

That's a nice guide!

For the open source section: SymbiFlow is now f4pga. https://f4pga.org/

Uhh, forgot a few. Only the lowest-cost PCIe FPGA dev boards on the planet

https://rhsresearch.com/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B9G97JN2

Looks like this is very Xilinx centric list. There are other vendors too. Intel/Altera being the biggest. With Lattice and Microchip probably following. Plus some newcomers I have no experience with.

One advantage of Altera: parts made on Intel's own fab (so Stratix-10 and Agilex) have reasonable lead times (8-12 weeks).

Lattice is great for extreme low power, I've been using their Crosslink-NX 28nm FPGAs recently.

Do any of the Intel fabbed FPGAs have a free development IDE? Last I checked, it was limited to older Altera-era FPGAs. I know the pricepoint of the Intel fab FPGAs is outside of even my work projects, but I was surprised to see how few FPGA families were supported by Quartus free edition, and was wondering if I missed something obvious?

Nope. But you can run Quartus Prime Professional in 30-day eval mode, I just did this for a Xilinx / Altera comparison. [Xilinx is ahead for deep combinatorial logic, I think because of the 8-level carry lookahead in each CLB. Altera was fine for well pipelined code. 1 Xilinx DSP == 2 Altera DSPs. YMMV.].

The Cyclone 10 GX line is the most advanced thing you can get for free, but it doesn't seem to have had much popular uptake anywhere (nearly no dev boards, etc.)

Intel recently announced their new "Sundance Mesa" series of FPGAs, which are Agilex, and designed as low-end replacements for Cyclone, etc. And they said that they'll be offering Quartus Pro free for Sundance Mesa devices. This really surprised me; generally speaking, in terms of software availability, Xilinx is much more approachable and there are plenty of high-end choices while using Vivado for free.

But beyond that: I just run Quartus in eval mode and rm -rf ~/.altera* once every 30 days and reset it. One of these days I'll get a license for my giant Stratix 10 board when my designs are more finished...

So I have a question. FPGA development really interests me, but I really don’t know where to get started. I’ve done a bit of embedded systems work, mostly with WinCE 5 a decade or so back and some work on video slot machines, but nothing at this level. What would be a good place to start? Most of the things I have looked at seem to assume a slightly higher level of knowledge than I currently have.

It's almost always best to start with an application. What do you want to do that involves moving a lot of data around while performing some hard realtime processing on it? The answer will tell you if FPGAs are a good fit for the job.

Assuming they are, the answer will also give you an initial handhold on the mountain of training and R&D work that you'll need to deal with to make it happen.

The first thing to note is that while HDL coding may look like programming, it is not (mostly). HDLs are for describing hardware, and it takes some time for this to sink in. There are two sides to the coin: understanding digital design in the abstract, and understanding HDL design patterns to define the desired logic circuits.

If you don't have any digital design experience, an oft-recommended course is nand2tetris.

I should say though, that that is the bottom-up approach. It is possible these days to string together a bunch of IPs and not write any HDL, depending on what you want to do. But you will probably be stuck if anything at all goes awry, so I don't recommend the top-down approach.

This is crazy helpful for beginners: https://github.com/FPGAwars/icestudio

They have drag and drop FPGA programming using visual gates and cores with very well documented examples.

https://archive.ph/d95Mm

You can add a board to the list now: https://www.fpgadeveloper.com/board-addition/

BTW This is very cool: https://github.com/FPGAwars/icestudio

Be nice if they had a list of boards with open source development chains (which would require them to acknowledge that Lattice exists - seems completely missing).

Super neat, but it seems like this should have been a Github repo that takes pull requests. The Sipeed Tang series seems like it should qualify for this list.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com