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Mine came from Nu Horizons, an electronic component distributor - http://www.nuhorizons.com/ - part # is 003-RD0004.

They're out of stock, but they seem to allow qty. 1 orders with a 2 week manufacturer lead time - you can try ordering one and see what happens.

However looking at Globalscale's site, it looks like they've now depreciated the openrd-client and openrd-base, and now have the "openrd-ultimate" which has a PCIe slot sticking out of it where the SD card slot used to be, and a MicroSD slot added by the audio connectors. Nu Horizons might sell that instead, but I can't find it.

Part number info from Digi Connect

Use the numbers to search on Nu Horizons.

Actually, given that this is FPGA based, perchance a more generic piece of hardware would be appropriate.

I've looked at FPGA development cards (usually several thousand dollars, but they're meant for DSP work generally). What we really need to go with the Verilog core they're designing is a modular add on card so you can either get a compatible reference design from someplace like Opencores.

We'd need several base designs with, say 1 to 4 onboard FPGAs. I am not a hardware designer, but I've done some research and at least from my perspective, I'd go with Xilinx since they're supporting all their Spartan3 with their freely downloadable WebPAK software which will support some rather large Spartan3 chips. I personally would like to have one card-edge connector version for PCI and another for ISA systems, but for the video package we'd need an AGP or PCI-X implementation first. A card edge socket for a backplane connection suite (VGA or audio or SCSI connectors for instance), possibly a memory daughtercard (either premounted memory for video or DIMM for using commercial main memory), maybe even a PC/104+ setup onboard would be nice.

Now, with the above, you could mix and match internal cards, output connectors, and daughtercards to create your audio card, or a video card, or just about anything you can think of and find or create the reference design for. Now, they DO make cards like this but they don't use the Spartan3 low cost chips, and they cost several hundred to several thousand dollars, and those boards that do meet a good chunk of even the basic requirements, like the development kit at Nuhorizons but there's no way to plug that into a PCI or AGP slot. Others are available, but use older tech, like the X84 ISA card. So, for the general hobbyist or designer, the company might be able to spin off the hardware design to general DSP or other type of work and help recoup more of the hardware cost that way.

Actually, for the (even more) adventerous, grabbing an available PCI backplane from Ebay or something would let you build your own computer from the ground up with the higher FPGA count units.

Now, mind you, this may not work well for a video card based reference design due to the higher bandwidth requirements.

You might try an Arm processor, many of which have great built-in features (like NIC, daq, memory management). You can get demo boards, and run linux + related gnu tools on them. ARM-based systems make great embedded/distributed systems (aka 'the future'), and are a useful to learn for the old-resume.

Yeah, yeah, yeah... the same meaningless price quotes from Xilinx as always. Historically it's been at 100,000 pieces in their widely published literature.

At 25,000 chips, you'd probably go to the trouble to create a custom ASIC. Or at least you'd do a "hard wire" conversion of the FPGA design to an ASIC, if you used the FPGA to "get to market quickly".

If you call up one of the actual distributors where you'd actually buy this part, say at qty 1000 to 5000, the store would be different. A lot different.

Only if you buy the wrong ones....

A nice list of FPGA dev boards and their prices

A nice cheap (and well loaded) dev board ($149)

I've got one of these, they are real nice for $99

These guys have lots of good stuff too. Inexpensive, and nice. I own a bunch of stuff I bought from them.

With a $99 FPGA development board and the free design tools from Xilinx, you too can make your own CPU without even breaking out a soldering iron. :)