Forum Discussion

Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
10 years ago

Updating my FPGA Course

In the near future I will be updating an online Introduction to FPGA course that I teach. This is an introduction course where i spend the first half of the semester covering Verilog. The second ha...
Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
10 years ago

If 8000 LE are enough for your introductory course, the BeMicro MAX 10 board from Arrow is cheaper than the Terasic boards and has (2) Pmod headers.

http://www.arrow.com/bemicro/

In general regarding UART's, if you need a true UART you probably need an off-board adapter (e.g. http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/ttl-232r-3v3-2mm/768-1095-nd). But you might be able to get away with the (free) Altera JTAG UART IP core which looks somewhat like a UART in the FPGA, but you need special (Altera) software on the PC to communicate with it.

Regarding board lifetime and Quartus overhaul, you'll probably need to contact the board vendors and Altera directly. You didn't mention "SoC" design, but Altera just dropped it's older SOPC Builder tool and the replacement Qsys is probably here for a while (both tools are installed as part of Quartus).