In days gone by, you could just order your FPGA starter kit from your distributor, unpack it and start working. There weren’t too many choices in development and prototyping boards, and you either made use of the one that came with the package, or you started a weeks-to-months long process of designing and fabricating your own.

In the modern FPGA world, however, the situation has changed. There is now a vast array of development and prototyping boards available, and the task of designing your own has become daunting in the face of exploding pin-counts and significant signal integrity issues.

With so many cost-effective pre-fab boards on the market, making your own should be a last resort for the desperate and for those inflicted with chronic NIH syndrome. Let’s take a sampling of a few of the types of boards available on the market today and look at the strengths and advantages of each.

First, you should consider the business models of the various suppliers. There are really two camps here: companies that subsidize the cost of adequate-for-many-applications boards by selling another product bundled with them such as software or silicon, and companies that make their money by producing and selling superior-quality specialized development boards for those who need the added capability. If your needs are modest and mainstream, chances are the subsidized boards are the best value for you. If, however, you’re pushing performance and/or connectivity to the limits, an investment in a high-end specialized board can easily pay for itself in development cost savings and time-to-market. [more]

Algorithms to Silicon
Using Prototype Boards to Accelerate System-level Verification
by Tom Feist, AccelChip Inc.

In 1999 NASA lost the Climate Orbiter while in route to Mars. Failure to recognize and correct an error in a transfer of information between the Colorado spacecraft team and the California-based navigation team resulted in the loss of the $125 million spacecraft. The engineering failure was due to the fact that one team used English units while the other used metrics for a key spacecraft operation. It just goes to show that the slightest error or miscalculation can lead to catastrophic results.

Veteran designers should always keep a couple of old clichés in mind: “Everything that can go wrong will go wrong” and “Hindsight is always 20/20.” Experience has proven the critical bug always shows up in the one area that you didn’t have time to simulate. It seems obvious after the fact, but by then it’s too late. However, system-level verification can decrease the chance of errors when building digital signal processing (DSP) chips. [more]

DSP Heats Up
Synplicity Enters DSP Synthesis

This week, Synplicity announced they are joining the ranks of AccelChip, Altera, Xilinx and others in offering tools that help bridge the DSP-on-FPGA design gap. The brass ring is out there. It is easy to see that FPGAs with large arrays of embedded arithmetic elements have the potential for dominant DSP performance. Realizing that potential, however, is a matter of spanning one of the biggest “tool gaps” in electronic design automation today. While the promised performance benefits are staggering, (10-100X faster throughput than a typical DSP processor), the development effort penalty is equally enormous.

In reality, if you want to take your DSP algorithm to an FPGA instead of a DSP processor, you can expect at least 10X the development effort and similar jumps in design complexity and required expertise. The move from a primarily software implementation methodology to hardware design introduces the need for hardware architecture expertise and VHDL or Verilog coding skills. It also involves the use of synthesis, HDL simulation, place-and-route and timing analysis tools. [more]