[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.
Power Driven Layout (PDL) support within the Libero IDE tool suite helps reduce power consumption by up to 30%. The FPGA board holds a 125-kgate, 8- by 8-mm AGL125 Igloo FPGA. The chip consumes as little as 5 µW. There’s a blue or green 96- by 16-pixel organic LED (OLED) display. Also included is a USB-based serial interface.
A 40-pin edge connector delivers a sizable chunk of interface pins from the FPGA. This makes the platform very interesting from a prototype standpoint, because additional peripherals can be easily connected to the system. An optional daughtercard controls brushless dc and stepper motors.
Actel’s Libero IDE Gold edition comes with the hardware. Linux and Windows versions also are available. Designers who are looking to build in a modular fashion can try the free Core- Console IP Development Platform (IDP). With CoreConsole, blocks of IP can be stitched together using a graphical user interface (GUI) that’s integrated with Libero. SoftConsole provides access to ARM Cortex-M1, CoreMP7, and Core8051 soft cores. It is an Eclipse-based IDE for software development targeting the soft cores.
The Icicle’s FPGA is a bit small for most of the soft cores, and it lacks the on-chip or off-chip memory to do much in this arena. Still, smaller cores like Actel’s CoreABC controller will fit nicely. It’s also ideal for controller applications.
WIDE-RANGING FPGA SUPPORT FPGA vendors obviously have their own chips in mind when they deliver development kits. In fact, these companies often have a number of kits for a particular chip family to address different application areas.
For example, the Xilinx Virtex-5 comes in a range of combinations. Its high end supports high-speed SERDES for PCI Express applications like Lattice Semiconductor’s board, while other versions with hard-core PowerPC processors can handle numbercrunching chores. A single kit or chip can’t fit all of these needs, so the vendor must provide a plethora of options.
Designers looking for alternative tools can turn to companies like Altium. The Altium Designer FPGA development tool supports a range of parts from Altera, Lattice Semiconductor, and Xilinx. Altium’s Desktop NanoBoard-NB1, which targets professional designers, is an excellent though expensive learning tool. The NB1 accepts modules with an FPGA, allowing designers to switch between vendors and chips.
Altium Designer reflects this flexibility, hiding the actual chip at a lower level. The high-level application design is portable between chips, leading to some interesting development scenarios because of particular FPGA characteristics. For example, some chips can be programmed faster than others. This permits development work on the fast programming platform and final testing and deployment on another chip, assuming that the application doesn’t employ special interfaces or target-chip characteristics.
Altium’s Innovation Station uses the same modules and development tools as the NB1 (Fig. 5). The primary difference is that the Innovation Stations are closer to end products than the open NB1. In fact, some companies have deployed products that use Innovation Stations. Granted, they aren’t as economical in large quantities compared to a custom design. But for small quantities and prototypes, it’s hard to beat.
Unfortunately, Altium is in the software business. Its products can be evaluated, but free versions comparable to those provided by FPGA vendors are unlikely. In fact, Altium takes advantage of the FPGA vendor tools by building its front end on top of these systems. From a developer’s perspective, the results are worth the cost. But for novices, it is a pricey option.
Avnet doesn’t make software or hardware, but it’s definitely in the business, providing a range of services in addition to distributing hardware such as FPGAs. The company also created its own line of evaluation and development kits for a number of vendors, including those in the FPGA space.
In addition, Avnet links some of its boards and kits to training sessions. Not too long ago, I attended a session on high-speed serial applications that address design and debugging tools plus SERDES configuration for Xilinx’s high-end parts (see “Get Up To Speed On Xilinx FPGAs,” ED Online 16378).
The $39 Xilinx Spartan-3A kit is one of the least expensive kits available from Avnet (Fig. 6). It contains a Xilinx XC3S400A Spartan-3A FPGA capable of supporting soft cores. The board has 128 Mbytes of serial flash and 32 Mbytes of NOR flash. A Cypress Semiconductor programmable systemon- a-chip (PSoC) sits between a number of interfaces and the FPGA, including a USB serial port and four CapSense capacitive switches. There’s also an I2C port and temperature sensor.
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