For the price of a few textbooks, the ultimate board for first-time FPGA users

Guy returns for another ipXperience, fresh off the back of ipXchange’s Embedded World interview with Arthur from Digilent; this is the board we were originally looking to talk to him about!

As Arthur explains, Digilent’s Nexys A7 provides a feature-rich platform for engineers looking to get started learning to use FPGAs, in this case a Xilinx Artix-7, which features 15,850 programmable logic slices and Internal clock speeds exceeding 450 MHz. In addition to offering ample peripherals to support development of devices for a wide range of applications – 5x Pmod connectors, a 12-bit VGA output, user switches/buttons/LEDs, 2x 4-digit 7-segment displays, a monophonic audio amplifier, and more – the Nexys A7 can also be used to prototype your own chip architectures, such as the custom RISC-V processors from Codasip.

For a relatively small amount of money, Digilent’s Nexys A7 provides a versatile, hands-on FPGA learning-and-development experience in stark contrast to simulated systems. Here at ipXchange, we’re always in the belief that an engineer won’t truly know if something works until they plug it in, so Digilent’s hardware-based learning platform is one we are very happy to write about!