Control Of Automatic Vehicle wash m/c

Do you need an FPGA or can you fit your design in a CPLD? That's something to consider. CPLD's have some electrical advantages.

Anyway, if your going to use an FPGA, use a Cyclone III for your design. Then, using the information available on the Altera website, select a package that gives you enough user I/O and I would choose a package that supports multiple logic densities.

The idea here is to choose a package that will allow you to drop in a larger FPGA with the same footprint if you decide you need it.

Use the Quartus software to help you determine how much logic you need. If you have a partially completed design, go ahead and create a project in Quartus and compile it. You can at least get an idea of how much logic your design might take.

Ask people on the forum if they can provide examples of how much logic their designs use.

For example, I have one design that uses a Cyclone II EP2C35. It has One NIOS processor, two TSE ethernet MACs, two small TFT controllers, one DDR2 memory controller, one fairly eloborate LED controller, a UART, some PIOs, and some other miscellaneous peripherals.

That design uses ~62% of the EP2C35's logic resources.

If you're going to use any of Altera's IP cores, they always give an estimate of how many logic resources will be used.