Friday, March 29, 2024

FPGA Development Boards

Using this article as your guide, you can solve this problem by first selecting the vendor for the FPGA, then selecting an appropriate family of chips from the vendor and finally deciding a suitable development board

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  • User I/O: Papilio-style wing interface with 48 user-defined I/O signals. The boards have female headers installed on the wing interface.

Other than the ones mentioned above, the market is full of other popular boards for Spartan-6, such as XuLA2, 5I25 from Mesa Electronics, Numato Mimas, Numato Saturn and many more. XuLA2 has an LX25 chip on a small breadboardable PCB with built-in USB programmer, 32MB RAM, 8Mb Flash, 33 I/Os and SD card socket. The design is completely open source.

Mesa Electronics has a slightly baffling array of FPGA boards. Two interesting ones are 5I25, which is a PCI card with a Spartan-6 LX9, and 6I25 (PCI Express).

Numato Mimas provides a Spartan-6 LX9, 16Mb Flash, 100MHz oscillator, USB programming interface, eight LEDs, four switches and 70 I/Os.

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Numato Saturn provides a Spartan-6 LX9, LX16, LX25 or LX45, 16Mb Flash, 100MHz oscillator, 512Mb LPDDR RAM, USB programming interface and GPIOs (via the FT2232H) and 118-150 I/Os.


Fig. 8: Nexys-4 development board
Fig. 8: Nexys-4 development board

Artix-7
1. Nexys-4

  • 15,850 logic slices, each with four 6-input LUTs and eight flip-flops
  • 4860 kbits of fast block RAM
  • Six clock management tiles, each with phase-locked loop (PLL)
  • 240 DSP slices
  • Internal clock speeds exceeding 450MHz
  • On-chip analogue-to-digital converter (XADC)
  • 16 user switches, 16 user LEDs and two 4-digit seven-segment displays
  • USB-UART bridge, 10/100 Ethernet PHY and 12-bit VGA output
  • On-board 3-axis accelerometer, temperature sensor
  • PWM audio output and PDM microphone
  • Micro-SD card connector
  • Digilent USB-JTAG port for FPGA programming and communication

Fig. 9: Lattice XP2 Brevia
Fig. 9: Lattice XP2 Brevia

Development boards for Lattice chips
1. Lattice XP2 Brevia

  • LatticeXP2 FPGA: LFXP2-5E-6TN144C
  • 2Mb SPI Flash memory
  • 1Mb SRAM
  • On-board USB controller for JTAG programming (FTDI -FT2232H)
  • 2×20 and 2×5 expansion headers
  • Push-buttons for GPIO and reset
  • 4-bit DIP switch for user-defined inputs
  • Eight status LEDs for user-defined outputs

LatticeXP2 Brevia is a development board with a small problem—the programmer needs a parallel port, and the USB programming cable is sold separately. The FPGA is a pretty low-end part as compared to the XC3S500E.


Fig. 10: Lattice ECP3 Versa
Fig. 10: Lattice ECP3 Versa

2. LatticeECP3 Versa

  • LatticeECP3 FPGA: LFE3-35EA-8FN484C
  • 64Mbit SPI Flash memory
  • 1Gbit DDR3
  • PCI Express x1 interface
  • Four SMA connectors for electrical testing of one full-duplex SERDES channel
  • Two RJ45 interfaces to 10/100/1000 Ethernet to GMII
  • Expansion connectors for prototyping
  • 14-segment alphanumeric display
  • Switches, LEDs and displays for demo purposes
  • Push-buttons for GPIO and reset, on-board reference clock sources
  • Programmed using a mini-USB cable via PCROHS-compliant

LatticeECP3 Versa is one of the cheapest PCI-Express development boards so far. It also has two gigabit Ethernet ports and high-speed serial connectors. It appears that the FPGA device requires a licenced version of the design software.


Fig. 11: Bugblat pif board
Fig. 11: Bugblat pif board

3. Bugblat pif

  • A complete FPGA development target—FPGA programming hardware is not needed
  • Plenty of on-chip 4-input LUTs—the pif-1200 has 1280, the pif-7000 has 6864
  • Plenty of on-chip 9kbit SRAM blocks—the pif-1200 has 7, the pif-7000 has 26
  • The FPGA is nonvolatile, with on-chip Flash memory for storing the configuration bit stream
  • Up to 256kbits user Flash memory
  • Hard-coded I2C, SPI, PLL and timer/counter blocks
  • Powered from the Raspberry Pi expansion connector (P1)
  • 47 pins of expansion connectors
  • Red and green LEDs
  • Support software supplied (in Python) for injecting a new configuration into the FPGA
  • Example projects supplied, including a project that controls logic inside the FPGA from a web browser

Bugblat pif is a Raspberry Pi add-on board that provides a MachXO2-1200 or -7000, 17 external I/Os (in addition to those used to communicate with the Raspberry Pi), two LEDs and programming circuitry.

The other popular development boards for Lattice FPGAs are iCEblink40-HX1K Evaluation Kit, TRIFDEV and Bugblat tif.

iCEblink40-HX1K Evaluation Kit comes with a USB programmer, four LEDs, four capacitive touch buttons, configuration PROM, 68 digital I/Os and supposedly some PMOD and Arduino shield compatibility.

TRIFDEV is an Arduino shield that provides 58 extra I/Os, and can also be used as a standalone development board. It has a MachXO2-1200, USB programmer, two buttons and five LEDs.

Bugblat tif is a coin-sized, breadboardable MachXO2-1200 or -4000 board. It has ten I/Os, USB programming (with cross-platform open source software that does not require drivers) and two LEDs.

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