FPGA-links We're trying to build CPU's and systems so RAM and general purpose I/O is important to us. That knowledge may help understanding the following notes. Here are the links and notes which lead us to buy the B5-X300 Super Vlaue Pack from Tony Burch:

• Rabbit Semiconductor makes a board not with FPGA but with a dedicated Zilog Z80-like processor. This is a nice board in that it has all the built in pieces parts we'd want, but instead of giving us an FPGA, it has a built in processor. Ideally, we'd find a version of the Rabbit board with a built in FPGA. Maybe we'd make one by adding our own FPGA in their proto-typing area.
• Some guy (?) has investigated this board. He seems really happy with it. At US$442, the B5-X-Super-Value-Pack comes with a 256KB of SRAM, 32MB of Compact Flash (slow, but very useful), and some I/O. This seems like the most reasonable contendor I've seen yet.
• EasyFPGA has two boards. One sports the Xilinx Spartan-II FPGA (Xilinx has moved on to the Spartan 3, and only the Spartan IIE is hi-lighted on their web site), the other board hosts the Altera ACEX FPGA.
• Altera has a list of development kits.
• Colorado Electronic Product Design has a couple of boards. The CXS200 also uses the Xilinx Spartan II . They also have the CAS10 Statrix board whish uses the Altera Stratix FPGA. Niether board has any SRAM.
• Parallax (remember the Basic Stamp?) has some FPGA based boards. These boards don't have SRAM built in, either.
• El Camino GmbH (of Germany) has some boards . The Digilab CC board (EUR$700) comes with an Altera Cyclone FPGA and 1MB of memory (256K x 36bit of SRAM).
• XESS.com makes a few boards that are architecturally more interesting. They have more I/O, more RAM controllers, everything is on the same board (no wires), etc. It's a very clean system, but it's $900. There is one $150 board that has good features.

I would think that SRAM, or compact flash would be very useful. After all, I'm trying to build a micro-processor. And, LaFarr is trying to build a math-engine. Either way, RAM is really helpful. So, hmm. It looks to me like the B5-X is still the best.