You can use almost any FPGA. But should you?
A reader wrote:
Will the Digilent Arty S7-50 FPGA board handle all of the WebFPGA labs in LAoE?
It could be overkill, but it’s on sale for 20% off and has some expansion capabilities that interest me. Plus, someone might get it for my birthday. 😀
My response:
There is no reason the Arty S7-50 should not work with all the labs except the ones in Chapter 18S which are Lattice iCE40 specific. We don’t use any fancy features of the FPGA, and the Spartan 7 has way more logic cells than the iCE40. You would, of course, have to use the Xilinx/AMD development tools. In addition, you would have to run wires from the Arty board to your breadboard.
Honestly, though, the magic of the WebFPGA is the simplified zero-install development environment. I can tell you when I first tried FPGA development I spent way more time struggling with the development tools than actually learning to use FPGAs. Xlinx was particularly annoying because there were multiple separate tools for each step of the process and when something did not work figuring out where the problem was was exhausting. (The developers of the tools also exposed EVERY parameter controlling their operation so finding the relevant one was very difficult.)
Since you are putting together your birthday request list, why not add the WebFPGA. (I just added a solder rework station to mine.) If you do decide to try the labs with the Arty board, let me know how it goes.