Eric Brombaugh wrote:
Digilent does mostly Xilinx-based FPGA development boards. Their Spartan
3E Starter Kit provides a 500k gate device with plenty of I/O (Ethernet,
LED, switches, buttons, rotary encoder, LCD, VGA, DAC, ADC, expansion
connectors, etc).
http://www.digilentinc.com/Products/Detail.cfm?Prod=S3EBOARD&Nav1=Products&Nav2=Programmable
There is a 40-pin Hirose connector on the right side of the board that
mates with some standardized expansion boards and provides 43 I/O pins.
The voltage levels on these I/O signals are jumper selectable to either
3.3V or 2.5V, but if you were to provide an external 1.8V you could use
that (would require a separate wire to the center pin of J9 on the board).
This board is $150 and a mating expansion board with uncommitted 0.1"
thru-hole grid is another $20. The on-board FPGA is programmable with
Xilinx's free tools, and the board provides a USB<->JTAG interface for
configuring the FPGA and flash.
Not an ideal solution long-term, but definitely an excellent way to get
a head-start on SDR interfacing. Mid-sized Spartan 3E parts are
available in non-BGA/CSP packages at reasonable cost for small
quantities (<$30) and would be fairly easy to design-in to DIY projects
with inexpensive PCB fab processes.
Thanks Eric, this looks like it will do the trick for evaluating the
expansion connector interfaces. My main concern at the moment is to work
out the best way to move data between the FPGA and the OMAP3 via the
expansion connector. This board provides a way to do this with the
minimum amount of fooling around :)
The Xilinx versus Altera is not ideal, but the FPGA configuration should
be easy to move between the two FPGA's.
Philip
