Low cost, low power FPGA card

Arrow has designed a new demonstration card for the Cyclone III FGPA
from
Altera. I attended one of the seminars yesterday. The board contains
many
peripherals, an EP3C25F324 FPGA, 1Gb SD Card, 96x64 pixel bit mapped
OLED
display, audio out, several LEDs, buttons, 32Mb CFI Parrallel Flash,
8Mbyte
cellular RAM, USB connector, User digital I/O and analog inputs routed
to a
LTC1863LCGN (200 Ksps 16 bit 89 dB ADC)

After the seminar, they give you the card and development system. The
development system includes Quartus (for writing FGPA code), the GNU C
compiler targeted at the NIOS II 32 bit CPU which takes up roughly 10%
of
the FPGA depending on configuration, and some software for designing
power
supplies like this board demonstrates. Oh, yes, it includes a battery
that
runs the MP3 player application when not connected to the USB, when
connected to USB, it charges the LI-Ion battery.

Price of my seminar was ~150 dollars, although they claim that others
are
~450. In class, we were unable to reprogram the FPGA, although they
said
this would be fixed soon. This seminar was the first one ever, taking
place
in Dayton, OH.

If you’re interested in a board like this, and learning more about FPGA
systems you might consider taking the seminar. The seminar was NOT an
introduction to VHDL or Quartus, so if you’re starting out in FPGA
design,
it may be a steep learning curve even with the hardware.

The board is said to be work ~400 dollars, and I have no doubt it is.
You
do get all the schematics and so forth if you want to make one yourself.

On 7/18/07, Kim T. [email protected] wrote:

Arrow has designed a new demonstration card for the Cyclone III FGPA from
Altera. I attended one of the seminars yesterday. The board contains many
peripherals, an EP3C25F324 FPGA, 1Gb SD Card, 96x64 pixel bit mapped OLED
display, audio out, several LEDs, buttons, 32Mb CFI Parrallel Flash, 8Mbyte
cellular RAM, USB connector, User digital I/O and analog inputs routed to a
LTC1863LCGN (200 Ksps 16 bit 89 dB ADC)

Just as a resource to link to:
http://www.altera.com/products/devices/cyclone3/design/cy3-design-resources.html#devkit

It also looks like they will have a 3C120 DSP-centric development kit
which will have some quicker ADCs and DACs as the page mentions. If
it’s the same price of their other DSP-centric Cyclone board
offerings, it will cost ~$1k and come with a seat of Quartus II.

Moreover, just as a reference, the next USRP that Matt is working on
seems to be using the Xilinx Spartan3(E?) series of FPGAs.

Brian