I’d like to see a breakout board for a small QFP FPGA (like say one of the low end 5-8k LE $15-$25 Cyclone IIs available on DigiKey or Arrow). Maybe throw a cheap VGA DAC peripheral and one of those nice Phillips LPC2138 ARM CPUs onboard and we could build all sorts of neat things with it and your other breakout boards.
You could probably even forgo the EEPROM configuration device for the FPGA and go with just the standard Altera-style 10 pin JTAG connector. If you’re clever about the wiring, you might be able to have the ARM to configure it at power-up (should you include one).
I know I’d buy one for $150-$250, given that professional FPGA development boards usually cost well over that and don’t generally include neat (yet mostly inexpensive) things like processors and VGA DACs.
So, how 'bout it?
Edit: Whoops. Didn’t realize the LPC2138s are nowhere to be found. Well, replace that with whatever processor you like (as long as it’s speedy!).
Hm. Well, looks like they only have Xilinx chips which would be great if I weren’t already completely addicted to Altera’s wonderful development suite.
It’s true that they only use Xilinx parts at the moment but you will be hard pressed to find a better value in development boards then their Spartan 3 and Spartan 3E platforms.
Seriously - everyone knows about digilent’s boards. Unless there is a huge demand for altera FPGAs, it seems unlikely that sparkfun can make a board that will beat digilent’s (in terms of sales.) On the other hand, I really have no idea what I’m talking about
