[kardashev]

Does anyone have knowledge about the comparison of different FPGA boards?

I've seen the Mojo v3 from Embedded Micro, the Papilio line of dev boards, and the miniSpartan6+ from Scarab Hardware.

It looks like all these dev boards are pretty similar since they use almost identical xilinx chips. Ideally, I'd like to find a board for which there is a robust community, good support, lots of examples, and has enough capacity/performance to take on more complicated projects with increased learning/skill.

I'm leaning towards the Mojo v3 board, since it seems very easy and has shields to expand capability, but does anyone have any experience, recommendations, or "I wish I had known..." stories for FPGA development?

[aprdm]

Basically, go with the market leaders, either altera or xilinx.

Altera DE brand is used in universities all over the world and they have their alteraforum (which is really old fashioned but does the job).

I would go with a DE2 or something like that. (Which has a Cyclone IV)

[planteen]

I like the Avnet MicroZed which is built around a Xilinx Zynq. The Zynq is a latest generation FPGA and dual core ARM on a chip. There's a decent community and all the development tools are free.

[caberus]

almost 10 years ago i wrote vhdl code on spartan series cards, and that time i noticed that Xilinx IDE was really far from Visual Studio. hope things have changed since then. So my suggestion is to check development tools as well, if you dont need the "best" board just, but also the ease of development

[planteen]

The Spartan series and Xilinx ISE are dead now. The new future is Vivado and 7 series FPGAs. I guess Vivado is better in some ways but it's integration with version control software is pathetic.