To develop for FPGA devices you first need to figure out what hardware and software you require. There are a several choices when it comes to selecting FPGA hardware. That said, some sources suggest that Xilinx and Intel Altera currently represent around 87% of the FPGA hardware volume. Therefore, many of the development boards available use one of those two vendors.
FPGA Hardware
I will be using an FPGA development board from Digilent. The specific board that I chose to use is called the Basys 3. This board is based on the Xilinx Artix-7 series FPGA architecture. For a number of reasons, the Basys 3 seems like a great board for starting out in FPGA development.
First, as an entry-level trainer board it cost $149 USD as of the time of this post. You power and program the device through a USB cable attached to your development PC.
Note that the required USB-A to USB-micro cable is not included so if you don’t have one be sure to add this to your order if you purchase one of these boards.
Basys 3 Features and Peripherals
Second, the Artix-7 is a very capable device. And it is significantly more powerful than the Spartan-3E devices commonly used on earlier entry-level FPGA boards. Some of its key features include:
- 33,280 logic cells organized in 5,200 slices (each slice contains four 6-input LUTs and 8 flop-flops)
- 1,800 Kbits of fast block RAM
- 90 DSP slices
- Internal clock speeds of 450 MHz
- An on-chip analog-to-digital converter
And finally, it includes a reasonable mix of on-board peripherals including:
- 16 slide switches
- 5 momentary push-button switches
- USB host connector for attaching keyboard, mouse or memory sticks
- 16 LEDs
- 4-digit seven-segment LED display
- VGA connector
- 4 Pmod expansion port headers
- Serial flash
The Pmod expansion headers enable you to plug-in new peripherals. For example, the Basys 3 Pmod Pack provides a nice set of add-on peripherals.
On the software tools side you will need to install the Xilinx Vivado Design Suite. At the time of this post I am using Vivado 2020.1. The WebPack version of these tools are available for free from Xilinx.com.
That’s it for now. And with that I will get started with my setup, and then we can get into some actual FPGA development.