Xilinx's PowerPC and MicroBlaze Development Kit, Virtex-4 FX12 Edition, comes with everything you need to check out sophisticated FPGA applications. It includes a development board with 1-Gbit Ethernet and serial interfaces, Platform Studio, over 60 IP cores, a JTAG probe, and a host of reference designs. Suitable for hard-and soft-core processor support, it costs $895. www.xilinx.com