I need a readymade development board with Ethernet 100 Mbps, a FPGA and enough I/O Pins ; being small and cheap is a bonus.

Board requirements

There are required :

• Ethernet 100 Mbps port with magnetics (transformer) and PHY, hardware MAC is better
• 2 MBytes of RAM, more is better (real RAM, not FPGA RAM)
• Flash memory to store the FPGA consiguration
• A FPGA with enough power to shuffle the data around, implement a softcore CPU, and maybe experiment with oversampling
• Development tools, especially compilers and a MAC IP core if there is no MAC hardware
• Fast programmation, compatible with USB JTAG programmer (serial takes forever)
• Obtainable (ie. can be ordered on line)
• Price < 300€ including taxes and shipping
• IO Pins : at least 28 high-speed I/O for audio ; more for volume control / display etc.

Note :
PHY : chip controlling the electrical transmission on the wire (physical)
MAC : controls the low levels of the protocol like computing CRCs etc (Media Access Control)

FPGAs contain a certain amount of gates or logic cells (LUTs) ; for instance the low-end Spartan 3 XC3S400 contains 400,000 gates which make up 8,064 LUTs.

Microblaze soft CPU core takes about 1000 LUTs.
Ethernet MAC takes about 1800 LUTs.
My circuit will be pretty simple and won't take more than 1000 ; so a XC3S400 would be a good choice.

I will add new articles as I examine boards on the Net.

Development

I will probably use the Xilinx free webpack.

The free webpack supports :

Spartan-3: XC3S50 - XC3S1500
Spartan-3E: ALL
Virtex-4 LX: XC4VLX15, XC4VLX25, XC4VSX25, XC4VFX12

Update

Suzaku-S with 1M Gate FPGA ordered and received !