I spent a lot of time searching the web for FPGA boards. It's hard to choose this kind of hardware, when you're such a beginner.

There's a large variety of FPGAs and boards, with diffrent ranges of capabilities (and prices). I finally went for this board : the Spartan-3 starter board, featuring a 200K gates Xilinx FPGA (for "only" $99). I convinced myself to begin with a "small" configuration, and to buy something more powerful only when I will face the limitations of it (my wife think that it is a good decision too:)). I chose this board also because it seemed that there was much documentation about it, and especially because I found this website containing a tutorial aimed at newbies.

I'm a newbie in electronic design, but I'm rather experienced with software programming... Therefore, trust me, it's always better to choose the more documented solution, even if it looks less powerful at a first glance. Power is useless without control.

So I ordered this board, with a 5V power supply. Now I'm impatiently waiting for it, reading some documents all around the web, to prepare myself as much as possible to welcome this little gizmo :)