Apart from designing our own boards for specific applications, we have also tried and used a number of ready-to-use FPGA Boards.

The ones we like(d) are (in alphabetical order) :

• ALSE’s Cyclone-based TORNADO FPGA board .
  See our “Products” page.
   
• Altera NIOS boards , and indeed the latest versions (Stratix and Cyclone) which directly include the Fast Ethernet I/F (MAC). As an example, we used this board to design a very nice High-Speed Patterns Generator for a customer. For a very basic cost, the features allowed the generation and control of 16 bits patterns at speeds up to 33 Ms/s. The application was to simulate a high-speed ADC with pre-recorded patterns in a DSP application. If you are interested by this application, contact us.
   
• Altera Stratix DSP board . Very efficient to prototype complete DSP applications. The embedded high-speed ADCs and DACs can be very useful to create demonstrators and for testing new concepts.
  See : DSP Development Kit, Stratix Edition
   
• Atmel FPSLIC Board . Combining an AVR risc-CPU and Programmable Logic in the same chip, this board is reasonably easy to setup, program and use.
  See DOC1952.PDF
   
• Lattice Evaluation Board . This board was initially designed as a Teaching tool, but it can also be used for fast prototyping of relatively simple functions. The board can be populated with four Lattice isp Devices (1032, 1016, 22V10 and GDS22). The board has been designed with a large User (wire-wrapping) Area.
  If you are interested into acquiring this board, contact us.
  Download our Complete User’s Manual here.
   
• Xilinx Spartan II Evaluation Board from Insight. This cheap board is nice to use both for Teaching purpose and for quick prototyping. Beware : the RS232 level converter is a DS276 which does not permit very high-speed bi-directional links. The 2-digits 7-segments display is an LCD. The wire-wrap area is generous and can (for example) be used to add a USB connection.
  See Insight’s Spartan-II Evaluation Board.
   
• Xilinx Spartan II Starter Kit from Seytronix including USB1.1 interface.
  If you look for an economical and incredibly compact proto board, this Kit is definitely worth looking at. The USB link is both efficient, fast, and easy to use. It requires only a very small amount of logic and performs transfers up to 1 mega bytes per second !
  See : http://www.seytronix.com
   
• Xilinx Spartan III Development Kit, including the board.
  Cheap yet includes many features. Well suited for Educational purpose.
  You will be able to test most our free ALSE IPs on this board : PS2, Clock and EggTimer examples, UART, Debouncer etc...
  See : http://www.xilinx.com/products/spartan3/s3boards.htm
   
• In the past, we used several Xilinx boards from XESS Corp., and were very pleased with them. See http://www.xess.com.
   

If you have a positive experience with other products and boards, let us know so we can reference them here.