Want to learn real digital hardware design? You might want to consider Field Programmable Grid Arrays or FPGAs. There are a lot of FPGA learning kits available today. Some are specially designed to target developments of commercial projects which are, of course, very expensive. Some are a little bit price friendly specially for students and FPGA newbies (like me).

I got one FPGA development board designed by Digilent which is the Basys FPGA board (there is already a newer version – Basys2). The regular price is USD79 and the academic price is USD59. I got mine from ebay for USD49 – of course, it is already used.

So, what does this FPGA board feature?

• The on-board FPGA is from the Spartan 3-E FPGA family of Xilinx.
• It has on board I/O devices – 7-segment displays, LEDs, slide, switches, and push buttons.
• It has one VGA port and one PS/2 port.
• It has external I/O  connectors.
• It can be powered by USB or wall DC adaptor.
• It has on-board oscillator – 25, 50, and 100MHz.
• It has on-board flash configuration ROM.
• It can be configured using the on-board USB board!

Pretty complete, isn’t it?

Indeed, it is a handy FPGA laboratory…