Here is a suggestion.
The Spartan 3E breakout is $79, however the chip itself is around $20 from digikey…I’m presuming the difference is due to low demand.
As a way of increasing demand and lowering price, how about a arduino type board with a FPGA attached with suitable programming hardware and software included.
It’d be a great way to introduce FPGAs to the general hobbiest market, probably increase demand and lower prices.
Phil
The difference in cost between the raw chip and the breakout board goes a little beyond just the value of the chip plus PCB. It also includes passives and manufacturing, not to mention the engineering it takes to get it right. Also, on this particular board, it starts out as a dev board but is then detached from the “dev” parts. It looks like it’s about the cost of the full dev board minus the cost of parts, so engineering costs were probably left on. Just to help enlighten as to the cost, it’s not really a 300% profit module 
A reason I think there’s no market for this is that once you know how to use an FPGA and what it’s capable of, you embed your processor right onto the FPGA. And your processor, whatever type you choose (AVR, PIC, HC08, 8051, etc.), is usually about four times faster and has whatever extra peripherals you want. Need an AVR with 8 16 bit timers? You got it. Whatever other hardware peripherals you may want in an MCU, if you can draw it up with logic gates, you can create it all on one package.
See opencores.org for a quick and dirty on what’s available to put on an FPGA.
The only reason for this would be for people not interested in learning much about FPGAs and using them only for small pieces of hardware - a few timers, a comparator, and a shift register combined together to offload a task from the processor that they’re more comfortable using. In this case, I think a CPLD+AVR would be a much better setup. This would be much less expensive than an FPGA and better fit the purpose.
They slice up a dev board just to get at the FPGA…that seems to be a bit wasteful. Oh well that explains the cost. I wonder what happens to the rest of the dev board?
I notice that Sparkfun already have a dev board with a CPLD for a ‘hobbyiest’ curiosity fullfilling price (ie spending $35 is a bit easier than $70). Be nice to have the raw chips though.
Thanks for the tip on opencores…will look into it.
A CPLD+micro would be nice…though I’d prefer a PIC just to save installing/relearning another toolset.
Phil
No, I highly doubt they are “slicing off” the dev piece, just manufacturing extras of the breakout half. My point was the engineering and development cost to them was the same.
Yes, a simpler CPLD dev board than the one they are currently offering would be nice, but you’ll definitely want at least some supporting circuitry. Parallel computing has learning curves, too A jumper-settable clock is a very nice and easy feature that makes using a CPLD easier and a lot more fun. Although then you’d be tempted to make state machines, and that could warp your mind some…