Boards and kits

Overview

The board is the first thing most people buy and the decision they most often regret. A board that fits the first project is rarely the one that fits the fifth, and a board that is too large costs money and a toolchain licence before you have learned anything. This hub explains how to choose, lists the categories by price, and points at the board database, which holds specifications, toolchain notes and verification dates for every board the site mentions.

The short answer for a beginner with no particular goal: a Tang Nano 9K or an iCEBreaker if you want the open-source flow and a 30 to 80 USD budget, a Basys 3 or Arty A7 if you want to learn Vivado for employment, and a DE10-Nano or a Kria KV260 if you want a processor beside the fabric. All are in the database.

Key ideas

Six questions before buying

Device size. Count the logic you will need, double it, and check that the board’s device has it. Small projects (UART, VGA, a soft processor) fit in 5,000 LUTs. A RISC-V with caches, a video pipeline or a small neural network wants 30,000 to 100,000. Memory matters more than LUTs for many projects: a board with no external RAM cannot hold a frame of video or run Linux, and the difference between SDRAM, HyperRAM, DDR3 and DDR4 is the difference between a weekend and a month of controller work.

I/O. Pmod and Arduino headers are the easiest way to attach things. High-speed interfaces (HDMI, Ethernet, PCIe, SFP) need transceivers or carefully routed pairs and set the price. Check whether a connector is wired to real transceivers or to ordinary I/O pins that can emulate the slow version of the standard.

Debug. A board with an on-board JTAG and UART bridge over one USB cable saves buying a programmer. Some cheap boards need an external cable, which can cost more than the board.

Toolchain cost. Most vendors give the tools away for small and mid-range devices, but check the largest device on the board you want. At the time of writing, AMD’s free Vivado edition covers devices up to the Artix-7 200T and some Kintex and Zynq parts, Altera’s free Quartus Prime Lite covers Cyclone and MAX families, and Lattice, Efinix, Gowin and Microchip offer free licences for most parts with some registration. Open-source tools cost nothing on the families they support.

Community. A board with a thousand users has answers on the forums, example projects and working constraint files. Boards from Digilent, Terasic, Sipeed and the open-hardware makers have that. An obscure board with a better device on paper may not.

The processor question. If your goal is embedded Linux, drivers and software talking to hardware, choose an SoC board (Zynq, PolarFire SoC, Cyclone V SoC, or a Zynq UltraScale+ module like the KV260). If your goal is to learn digital design, a plain FPGA keeps the system simpler.

Representative boards

Under 50 USD: the Tang Nano 9K (Gowin GW1NR-9, HDMI, PSRAM) is the cheapest board worth a serious project, and runs the open flow. 50 to 150 USD: the iCEBreaker (iCE40 UP5K, the open-source community’s reference board, with Pmods), the Basys 3 (Artix-7 35T, the university standard for Vivado with switches and displays) and the DE10-Lite (MAX 10, the Quartus equivalent). 150 to 500 USD: the Arty A7-100T (Artix-7 100T, DDR3, Ethernet, a good RISC-V host), the ULX3S (ECP5, open hardware, SDRAM, HDMI, the ECP5 open-flow board), the DE10-Nano (Cyclone V SoC with dual Cortex-A9, the MiSTer retro-computing platform), the PYNQ-Z2 (Zynq-7020, Python framework for driving the fabric from Jupyter) and the KV260 (Zynq UltraScale+ on a Kria module, aimed at vision and Vitis AI). 500 to 2,000 USD: the PolarFire SoC Icicle, with four RISC-V cores and a flash-based FPGA, the most complete Linux-on-RISC-V-plus-FPGA board available. Above that, vendor evaluation kits with the largest devices, typically bought on a company budget with the licence that goes with them.

Where to start

Read /learn/beginner/01-what-is-an-fpga/ before buying anything, and /learn/beginner/10-from-rtl-to-board/ to see what the first build-and-program cycle looks like on each toolchain. The whole beginner track is written to run on any board in the learn or course categories above. When you have a board, the blinking LED in /learn/beginner/05-your-first-hdl-module/ is the first thing to get working, because it proves the cable, the tools and the constraints file in one go.

Tools and vendors

Common mistakes

• Buying the biggest board you can afford as a beginner. The tools, the licence and the complexity get in the way.
• Buying a board with no on-board programmer and discovering the cable costs 60 USD.
• Picking by LUT count and ignoring memory, which decides whether the interesting projects are possible.
• Assuming every HDMI or Ethernet connector is wired to the fast version of the standard.
• Choosing a board with no community, then having no working constraints file to start from.
• Buying a used board without checking that the vendor still supports the device in the current tools.

Going deeper

• Digilent reference site, with manuals and constraint files for every board.
• Sipeed Tang wiki, the official documentation for the Tang Nano and Primer series.
• 1BitSquared iCEBreaker and Radiona ULX3S, the open-hardware boards with their design files.
• Microchip PolarFire SoC Icicle Kit.
• AMD Kria KV260 Vision AI Starter Kit.
• PYNQ project, for the Python framework and supported boards.