Benefits and pitfalls of building and buying-in: Choosing chips and boards

Benefits and pitfalls of building and buying-in: choosing chips and boards programmable devices of all types provide users with the fundamental ability to quickly try out their ideas and interactively develop their designs. Well that´s the theory, but in practice many are slow to make progress due to the physical issues associated with modern device packaging. This session considers how useful it is to exploit prefabricated boards and considers not only the obvious advantages of buying in boards but also the pitfalls and challenges of using such boards for education, device evaluation, design development and on into production. An ever growing number of FPGA users do not have a traditional hardware engineering background; could this drive demand for boards to a new level?