Hey everyone i am a EE student and last semester i had a fpga design course wich was a lot of fun. We used some xylinx dev board that cost about 300€ and i dont really want to spend that much money right now. I would love to design a little cpu, not shure yet if i want to implement the risc instruction set or just wing it but i dont have a fixed set of requirements yet. Would you design your own board with a mcu for programming, the fpga and maybe dram or would you get a dev board? Does someone know a good dev board that does not break the bank? With the xylinx board i obviusly worked with vivado, how are the tools of alterra or others in comparison in your opinion? Thanks for your input!
Ive been playing around with these Alchitry boards. The IDE they’ve made for them is a little funky looking but you can make bit files with standard tools like Vivado and just use their tools to flash them. https://shop.alchitry.com/collections/products
The Digilent Arty boards aren’t very expensive and are well supported, including board files and programming support in Vivado I believe. https://digilent.com/shop/arty-s7-spartan-7-fpga-development-board/
Cheaper than those you’ll probably need to change FPGA vendors, like this Lattice board https://www.tindie.com/products/tinyvision_ai/upduino-v31-low-cost-lattice-ice40-fpga-board/
I’m a big advocate for open source hardware and software, which The FPGA industry really struggles with. I’ve heard the ICE40 FPGA is supported with an open source software tool chain. It looks capable enough to make a CPU and low speed peripherals, but I haven’t used them.