Dear Akbar Ahmad, The Xilinx says it has created devices which are "more than a processor, more than an ASIC and more than an FPGA". However, for teaching and learning we are managing with ALTERA university program.

Comparatively FPGA Xilinx Kit is now a days using extensively in universities and industries. It has very user friendly software too. Due to its wide usage it has got many of (user manuals/guide/programming manual/reference manual) available free on internet, by which Xilinx kit has become very easy to use and get familiar with.. So I suggest Xilinx kit is the best platform for hardware realization of FPGA.

It depends on the target application. In our case, for space devices, Actel is a great option. I like Actel FPGAs and the Libero kit. It is easy to use and provides a great development environment.

I manage the Xilinx University Program here at the University of Rochester. Their ISE platform is very good. For developing hardware, we use Verilog, and for writing C programs, we use their Embedded Development kit. This allows us to combine reconfigurable hardware with a C program. So, we end up using C programs for non-performance-critical things,while Verilog is used for performance-critical hardware.

Among the platform mentioned, Xilinx will be the best option, as lot of resources available for one to understand the implementation.

I agree with Sebastian, the choice will be application specific and also cost driven. Xilinx is a very good choice for affordable solutions and the Kit's and white papers are very widely available and provide a lot of useful material, example code, IP cores etc. However, if you are interested in targeting radiation sensitive environments, then Actel or Atmel devices would be very appropriate, although Xilinx does offer radiation tolerant solutions requiring additional design effort to improve on their reliability in harsh environments.