A cheaper FPGA reference board

One of the things I found time to look for was a cheaper reference board. The Digilent Spartan-3E Starter board I'm using is packed full of features, and as reference boards go is quite reasonable at around $200 (USD). However, it's gross overkill for this little application. I'm using 3% of the FPGA's slices and LUTs, and none of the other on-board hardware.

I came across some really hobbyist-unfriendly products in my search. One product came with a free toolchain license, but it automatically synthesized logic to monitor how long the FPGA had been running and shut it down after 24 hours. The cost of the lowest tier license that didn't produce self-terminating loads was prohibitively high, and required expensive, yearly renewals. I don't care how good their products are or how cheap a single chip is, the lack of a usable toolchain makes them not suitable for hobbyist use.

Poking around a bit further I found a demo board with a Lattice HX1K part that sells for $20 (USD). Yes, that's 10% of the S3E board's cost. There's no extra hardware on this board, just the FPGA, an oscillator, a SPI Flash ROM, and an ATMEL microcontroller that implements the USB programming interface. The board is in a form factor that supports both PMOD and ChipKit interfaces, for those who value such features.

Running my current 4004 CPU sources through their toolchain produces a load that uses about 40% of the logic cells and one of the 16 block RAMs (it put the 64-bit scratchpad array in a 4K-bit block RAM, but not the 48-bit instruction pointer array). The remaining block RAMs are sufficient to support a full set (16 each) of 4001 ROMs and 4002 RAMs, and there should be enough logic cells to interface them. Power consumption at full speed is spec'd as a small fraction of the quiescent consumption of the S3E, though it's also a small fraction of the capacity too, and requires only two voltage sources rather than three. For more ambitious designs there is another chip in the same family that has 4x the logic cells, though it's in a larger package (TQ144 vs VQ100) so you can't just swap chips on the same board.

There is a free development environment license (Windoze-only *grumble*), though the license is only valid for one year. I'm hoping they'll allow hobbyists to request a new license. After all, hobbyists sometimes turn into consultants who recommend products in their professional capacity.

My plan is to continue to use the Xilinx S3E as a target, as I'm much more familiar with the Xilinx ISE development environment, but with an eye toward making sure it'll port easily to the Lattice HX series.