Originally Posted by AC0VH Originally Posted by

My design experience is primarily with Actel RTAX and Xilinx Virtex 5 FPGAs. Not sure why you'd want to tinker with them other than just to tinker. There's no cost advantage (a cheap Virtex-5 development board is $1k) and cheap FPGAs aren't really enough performance advantage for this type of thing (e.g. RTTY and slow rate BPSK). Plus you'd have to learn Verilog & VHDL and unless you're wanting to go into ASIC design there no call for it. My experience is that System-C and other attempts to design C-to-hardware compilers will leave you with unsynthesizable code for anything other than Hello World.



Never tried using anything open source to target them, always done Designer, ISE, Synplicity, Synplify, since I have to use qualified tools, so the cost (unless you can wrangle student versions) is steep to say the least. To get set up with even a rudimentary design flow for SDR level FPGAs is $5k I'd think.



Maybe you could look into the Altera devices. Development boards for like a Cyclone 4 are much cheaper, usually a couple hundred to maybe $500 at the top end. It would have the power to do SDR if you put some of the filtering on the board rather than in the FPGA. Altera also gives you access to a development environment free through the web.