[Technology Report]
Dev Kits Help Alleviate Those FPGA Design Woes
The latest crop of FPGA Kits brings novice FPGA designers up to speed much more quickly.
The more interesting parts can be found in the Video Starter Kit documentation and reference design CD. It offers details on the base design built around the 32-bit MicroBlaze soft core as well as the sample reference designs. Components such as frame buffer controllers and similar support required for camera input and video output round out the IP offering.
Standalone designs like those targeted by the Xilinx kit are quite common. In other instances, the FPGA is part of a modular system linked together with high-speed serial interfaces. Such is the case with Lattice Semiconductor’s PCI Express Development Kit (Fig. 2).
In general, the FPGA can support high-speed serial interfaces (PCI Express, Serial RapidIO, and InfiniBand) with plenty of headroom for application firmware. In fact, FPGAs are often found on boards like the VPX (VITA 46) form factor used in military and aerospace applications (see “All A-Board,” ED Online 19158). This allows a single board to be programmed to support different protocols using high-speed serializers/deserializers (SERDES) built into the FPGA.
Lattice’s 4x PCI Express board can plug into a standard PC. The FPGA is a LatticeECP2M. Four sets of SERDES are dedicated to the PCI Express interface, while others are tied to 10 surface-mount-assembly (SMA) connectors. The four binary network connectors (BNCs) that are on the edge of the card provide the FPGA with a Society for Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) video interface. Additionally, the card has a small array of switches and status LEDs that can be manipulated by the FPGA.
This kit is designed for testing PCI Express support versus developing an FPGA interface application, unless it can be supported by the board’s other connections. The software that comes with the kit includes Lattice Semiconductor’s ispLever. However, the free ispLever Starter version doesn’t support the LatticeECP2M found on the board. Therefore, most developers will likely buy a full license and probably switch to another platform, depending upon their design requirements. The kit also includes demo and PCI Express configuration software.
Another “starting point” kit is Altera’s $449 NIOS II Embedded Evaluation Kit, Cyclone III Edition (Fig. 3). This system highlights the 32-bit NIOS II soft-core processor and the Cyclone III EP2C25F324 FPGA. It comprises two boards: One houses the FPGA and some peripherals, and the other has the 800-by-480 LCD and additional connections including Ethernet.
The LCD touchscreen provides one user interface with a complementary set of buttons on the back of the unit. The system can run off of batteries, though a battery pack isn’t supplied. The size is a bit large for handheld devices, but it’s sufficient as a prototype and demonstration tool.
The system incorporates 16 Mbytes of flash and 32 Mbytes of double-data-rate (DDR) SDRAM, as well as 1 Mbyte of SRAM. Its storage-device (SD) card slot can hold NIOS II applications. The default application loaded into the FPGA provides an interface to SD-based applications.
The system comes with the free Web Editions of Quartus II and the ModelSim simulator, which don’t time out. Developers typically move to the full version when development turns serious, though. The package also includes InterNiche’s IPv4 Niche- Stack TCP/IP Network Stack. IPv6 and additional services are available from InterNiche.
Furthermore, the system comes out of the box ready for NIOS II software applications, though the platform is equally capable of handling FPGA design. This is a significant advantage for FPGA novices who want to concentrate on software design, but also need the flexibility and power of an FPGA. Additional IP may simply be an extra peripheral in the NIOS II collection of devices, or it may be a more ambitious design in which the processor tends to act as a control device rather than be the center of attention.
The kit offers a range of tutorials, including software-oriented examples that work with the Eclipse-based NIOS II integrated development environment (IDE). It also provides “FPGA design in one hour” that gets your feet wet with hardware IP.
Actel’s $99 Icicle is an even more compact design (Fig. 4). The hardware consists of two boards—a FlashPro 3 programmer/ debugger and the FPGA board. The design is compact enough for creating portable applications. In fact, the FPGA board can run off its own rechargeable lithium-ion battery. The system is designed to measure dynamic, static, and Flash*Freeze power requirements.
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