SmartFusion2 SoC FPGA Eval Kit Helps Speed Prototyping, App Development
Faster evaluation and prototyping of FPGA designs in today’s PCI Express and Gigabit Ethernet-based systems, like those based on transceiver I/Os, is the bailiwick of Microsemi’s SmartFusion2 SoC FPGA Evaluation Kit. The PCIe-compliant evaluation board can be used on any desktop PC or laptop with a PCIe slot. Features include an RJ45 interface to 10/100/1000 Ethernet, 512 Mbytes of LPDDR, 64 Mbytes of SPI flash, and USB-UART connections, as well as I2C, SPI, and GPIO headers. The kit incorporates a 12-V power supply, but also can be powered via the PCIe edge connector. With the kit, designers are able to develop and test PCI Express Gen2 x1 lane designs, test the signal quality of the FPGA transceiver (using the full-duplex SERDES SMA pairs), or measure the power consumption of the SmartFusion2 SoC FPGA, among other tasks.