[sdiy] Burched FPGA board

[Colin Hinz]

On Tue, 11 Nov 2003, jbv wrote:

> Last question on this topic : what could be the best choice of board for
> educational purpose, and then programming chips to be used / soldered
> on various PCBs (synth modules) ?

Well, ideally, one would like to be able to buy a "minimalist" board
which would be small and cheap and have just the absolute essentials
(FPGA, configuration PROM if needed, some provision for external
high-speed memories, and the power and I/Os brought out to 0.1" headers)
-- the goal being to eliminate the time-consuming and disaster-prone
step of DIY surface-mount brain surgery. The only SMT adapters of any
type that I've seen are ones offered by "footprint adapter specialists"
such as Ironwood, and for whatever reason they cost the moon.

In terms of development boards, the ones from Insight Electronics
(aka Memec) are the only ones I have experience with. Their
DS-KIT-S2E3LC uses the same family/density FPGA as the BurchED board
but is somewhat more expensive, though on the other hand Insight's
board comes with configuration PROM (mandatory for Xilinx FPGAs,
unless you want to use the PC config downloader every time you
power on the board), 32 megabytes of SDRAM, peripheral connectors,
dipswitch and LEDs on-board; whereas they are extra from BurchED.

On the other hand, BurchED offers inexpensive Compact Flash and IDE
adapter boards, which I think is pretty nifty. :=)

- Colin Hinz
  Toronto, Canada