Well, it's bad enough that I do FPGAs for my day job, but I have a couple of non-work-related ideas I want to try out. It turns out that there's a cheap ($99!) Xilinx Spartan-3 kit available from Digilent which has plenty of resources and expansion capabilities, so I sprung for it and the Cypress EZ-USB-based USB 2 daughter board. It oughta be interesting and for purposes of proving a concept, well, it's a heckuva lot cheaper than designing a PCB and getting all of the parts and stuffing it. There's even a Yahoo Group to discuss this kit.

I'm sure that if your intent is to marry an 8051 to this guy, it should be straightforward if you get their $12 wire-wrap daughtercard. Or you could just use someone's synthesizable 8051 core (or write your own!) on the board.

I don't have any opinion on whether Brand A FPGAs are better or worse than Brand X (or Brand L, or Brand Q, or the Other Brand A). They all work and for all but the most pushing-the-envelope designs, choose the appropriate family and you'll be fine. Pick the chip vendor with the best FAE and factory support.

-a