Is the Parallella a good platform for learning about FPGAs?

[jacob12]

I'm currently a student and would like to know a lot more about FPGA development. I have only minor experience in Verilog after taking a Digital Logic course.

Is the Parallella a good entry-level platform to learn about FPGAs?

[FHuettig]

Like most things the answer depends on what you really want to do. If you are learning Verilog and want to do some simple things like lighting-up LEDs and responding to buttons or controlling motors and such then no, there are cheaper options that have LEDs and buttons. The Parallella has neither, even if you get a Porcupine breakout board you'd still have to wire-up your LEDs and buttons to that, and without a breakout board it's not simple to connect anything to the FPGA. Check out entry-level boards like (not that I'm endorsing anyone else's products!), and I'm sure we'll get lots of responses with cheaper or better solutions than that. That particular board has lots of IO pins as well as a USB interface for transferring data from a PC and several PMOD connectors which can connect directly to all sorts of sensors, displays, and most other peripherals you can think of.

You might also look on eBay and see if there are some general-purpose FPGA boards going for cheap.

However, if you are comfortable with Verilog and general RTL design and want to take things to the next level, then I think the Parallella is a pretty good and quite reasonably priced platform for learning about the AXI processor interface and all the things you can do with that and an Arm processor. You also have access to an HDMI PHY for playing with video generation.

This is just my opinion and yes, I'm definitely biased!