[oc] Beginner seeks advice

[bob.cousins@philips.com]

Hello everyone.

Although an experienced programmer, I am pretty much a novice
when it comes to hardware.

I have a personal project to build an "add-on" device for a PC based
puzzle solving program. The program attempts to place tiles on
a grid in order to construct a larger shape. A major part of the time
is taken up determing if tiles overlap, a simple AND and compare
to zero operation but it is executed many times. 

I think that an FPGA would be an ideal way to speed up this operation
by performing it in parallel directly in hardware. If the tiles were hard
coded, I calculate about 60,000 OR gates are needed. This would 
require 128 input pins and 2508 output pins though. I assume that 
an FPGA is flexible enough to implement multiplexers etc to
allow data to be loaded and read out in smaller chunks.

At the moment I am slightly bewildered by the variety of options
and potential cost of buying tools. My budget would be around
US $1500. I am hoping there are some cheap or free tools available!

Can anyone tell me

a) is it a feasible project to achieve within the budget
b) could it be implemented on one or a few inexpensive chips 
     (Xilinx XCV50 say)
c) which chips and tools are best to get started with

I would like to get hold of something to just learn on, but I don't
want to spend $700 on a kit which is not suitable, as that blows
half my budget!

On the flip side, if there are projects desparate for software help
I would be happy to lend some time to them if I can.

-- 
Bob Cousins
Software Engineer.
Bob.Cousins@philips.com