Dear Digilent Santa

[zygot]

For the most part I've avoided being naughty most of the year, despite what JCOLVIN might tell you.
I realize the your elves have already committed the factory resources to this year's toys so I'm getting a head start on Christmas 2020.

Lately I've been finding that my favorite FPGA platforms for doing useful things aren't from you, or even have Xilinx devices on them. This is horrible as I really don't prefer Intel tools anymore.

Could you assign your design elves to projects that let you keep up with the other guy's? Specifically:

• The Terasic OpenVino Cyclone V GT Starter board. With 4-lanes of Gen2 PCIe, a useful PCIe driver SDK, and lot's of LVDS or single-ended IO, all for under $600,  what more could one ask for? Well, how about one or two 1 GbE interfaces ( Did you know that there are 10 GbE PHYs these days, hint hint ) and a Series 7 FPGA ( I'm thinking of a Kintex 160T)
• The MAX10 Development Kit. For under $200 it has (2) 1 GbE PHYs, DDR3, a USB UART, and an HSMC connector. Wow! Put a USB 3.0 bridge on that HSMC connector and you have a great platform for capturing Ethernet traffic between two nodes. Actually, I've got a long list of projects for this board. Unfortunately, Vivado is pretty useless here.

My last wish is for you to assign whoever has decided that all of your new FPGA boards will be ZYNQ based, to the other pole running a taco concession. Don't get me wrong ARM devices with a bit of FPGA logic are great; just not appropriate for most useful FPGA projects.

PS.
I'm glad that you started using the SYZYGY standard as an alternative to those tired old 12-pin PMODs. Of course we all don't need a plug and play interface for our add-on boards so isn't about time for PMODv2? Don't forget that some of us boys and girls like playing with toys that can do useful things other than sell PMOD merchandise.

Yours, hoping that we can all have a great 2020.
 

[vicentiu]

Thanks for the feedback... it keeps us on our toes.

We wish you the same for 2020.