FPGA for a beginner

[rashimkavel7]

I'm sorry if this is the wrong place to post, but I'd like to purchase an FPGA kit. What do you guys recommend? I'm a completely new to this and I'm interested in something with proper linux support. I was thinking a decent project for practice would be to implement FFT. Any thoughts? Thank you.

[JColvin]

Hi @rashimkavel7,

There is a nice thread on here that discusses some of our different boards here: https://forum.digilentinc.com/topic/2576-hello-digilent-community/.

As for implementing an FFT, a number of people use the IP core from Xilinx though you can do it otherwise as per these couple of threads here and here, (with many more threads on the FFT topic elsewhere on the forum).

I'm not certain what you are envisioning when you say "proper linux support". Digilent has some Petalinux projects for a number of our Zynq boards but they tend to be restricted to certain versions of Petalinux.

Thanks,
JColvin

 

[D@n]

@rashimkavel7,

Welcome to the fun!  I'll second @JColvin's responses above.  There's lots of ways you can go about this.  Don't forget proper engineering discipline: be sure to break the project into parts, and verify each of the parts separately before trying to do everything at once.  Failing to do so seems to be the most common problem folks have when using FFTs.  (Well, that and AXI-stream signaling, generating a proper clock, etc ...)  I'm also not sure what you want with Linux support.  Do you want to run Linux on the FPGA?  Or do you want to interact with the design from a Linux host nearby?  Both are quite reasonable, although the former is a bigger challenge than the latter.

Dan

[zygot]

On 8/5/2020 at 11:30 AM, rashimkavel7 said:

I'm a completely new to this and I'm interested in something with proper linux support. I was thinking a decent project for practice would be to implement FFT.

If you are new to FPGA developent ( my interpretation of the above statement ) then I would suggest that an FFT is a bit further off on the horizon. Perhaps a better way of thinking about this is how do you want to 'practice' with an FFT. Are you planning on using Xilinx IP and the board design approach or are you interested in learning how to do proper HDL design? I ask because I have the feeling that this is going to require a bit of discussion to figure out what it is exactly that you envision doing. I'm assuming that you aren't sure yourself.

You can run Xilinx development tools on particular versions of Linux or Windows. Read the information on the Xilinx Vivado download page carefully.

We're all confused by what you mean by 'proper Linux support' as FPGA logic devices don't run OSes, unless you have a soft or hard processor in them. Running Linux on a soft processor makes no sense, at least to me. Running Linux on an FPGA with a hard ARM processor complex is marginally better, but you aren't going to keep up with the latest Raspberry Pi4 with 8 GB of memory with any of them. Now, if you are going to 'roll your own' Linux flavored minimalist OS using Yocto or some such tool on a high end ZYNQ Ultra with 8 GB of DDR then perhaps Linux makes sense. This is, of course, my personal perspective on the issue. The truth is that developing with ZYNQ is difficult. Using Linux on ZYNQ is hard because of limited resources. I don't know of a good but inexpensive ZYNQ board that could compete with an decent SBC if you want to do computer-like things with it.

I guess that if I'm trying to make a point it's that fleshing out your concept of how you want to use an FPGA board  before spending money is a good idea. If you want to do that, then you've definitely come to the right place.