What kind of board would you like? What device? What peripherals? What connectors/interfaces to the outside world? Let us know what your dream board would be, and it might just appear ![Wink ;)](https://www.eevblog.com/forum/Smileys/default/wink.gif)
Well, the Lattice eval board is not expensive but it has no external RAM.
https://www.latticesemi.com/en/Products/DevelopmentBoardsAndKits/ECP5EvaluationBoardThey have a Versa board which has more to offer, but it's a lot more expensive and I don't need PCIe.
https://www.latticesemi.com/Products/DevelopmentBoardsAndKits/ECP5VersaDevelopmentKit.aspxThe LambdaConcept board mentioned earlier looked good, but too few IOs for my needs, and all broken out on PMOD connectors as far as i've seen, so that's limiting.
One thing to note that applies to all 3 boards above is that they have ECP5UM parts. That's the ECP5 with SERDES. Which is nice. Except that those aren't supported by the free license for Diamond. (Lattice boards, I think, come with a 1-year license for Diamond, after 1 year, you'll have to pay...) Between this and the limited free IP catalog, at this point you may say that Lattice is rubbish...
There's an open source alternative to Diamond though, which is yosys. It supports the ECP5. I wasn't considering this, but that's always an option.
Anyway, at this point, the board I found at Aliexpress will do the job for my evaluation needs. But ideally, a dev board for my needs would include:
- Available with ECP5U or UM from -12 to -85,
- LPDDR or DDR3 RAM, a 32-bit data bus would be nice (either as a single chip or two chips combined), at least 1Gbits (128MBytes),
- Alternatively LPSDR RAM (also 32-bit data bus, 512Mbits min - but I think that's the maximum available per chip these days),
- HDMI output,
- JTAG connector (no onboard programmer!),
- FT232H or FT2232H with all bus pins routed to FPGA (so we can use it in async and sync parallel FIFO modes),
- Alternatively, a FT6xx chip for USB 3.0 SS interfacing,
- About 100 I/Os broken out, with a number of them decently routed as differential pairs.
- A couple LEDs for good measure.