If you need an off-the-shelf FPGA board with a high-speed PC interface that doesn’t require man-years of software development, you can’t do much better than Opal Kelly. By providing a turnkey solution, including USB firmware and drivers at both ends, as well as a range of FPGA performance options, they are likely to have a board that meets your needs.

Black Forest Engineering provides custom mixed-signal ASIC design, including custom CMOS image sensors used in biomedical and x-ray applications. They are a small company located in Colorado Springs that can often perform faster and more flexibly than larger companies.

The Xilinx Zynq series of chips are great when you need a combination of software and FPGA logic in one chip. Even if you don’t think you need this, you do! There are a number of inexpensive platforms to try out the concept, and the Zedboard and related boards are great for product proof-of-concept development up to a full product implementation. They come with a variety of standard interfaces including Ethernet, USB, SPI, HDMI, I2C, audio, etc. as well as on-board DDR3 memory, flash storage, and SD cards. We can work with you to get your project going on a Zedboard much quicker than if you had to develop your own hardware first. If the form factor and product volumes work for you, this speed-up of development time can often outweigh any cost advantages of custom hardware.