Evaluation board accelerates FPGA designs

The evaluation board helps designers to rapidly prototype and test ECP5 designs, and is optimised to deliver the high-performance features found in the ECP5 family of FPGA devices, including the enhanced DSP architecture, high-speed SERDES, and high-speed source synchronous interfaces.

The board is developed using a half-length PCI Express form-factor, which allows demonstration of the PCI Express x1 interconnection. The board features a USB-B connection for the UART and device programming, and comes equipped with 128M Serial SPI Flash, 1GByte DDR3 memory components (64Mbyte x 16), two RJ45 jacks that interface to a 10/100/1000 Ethernet to RGMII and an expansion mezzanine interconnection for prototyping.

Other design features of the board include switches, LEDs and displays for demo purposes, easy power measurements, a 14-segment alpha-numeric display, and onboard reference clock sources.      

The ECP5 device family covers look-up-table (LUT) capacity to 84K logic elements and supports up to 365 user I/Os. The FPGAs are suitable for a wide range of high-volume, high-speed, and low-cost Digital Signal Processing (DSP) applications.

Typical programable logic functions used in these applications are Finite Impulse Response (FIR) filters, Fast Fourier Transforms (FFT) functions, Correlators, Reed-Solomon/Turbo/Convolution encoders and decoders. The pre-engineered source synchronous logic implemented in the ECP5 device family also supports a broad range of interface standards, including DDR2/3, LPDDR2/3, XGMII and 7:1 LVDS.      

The board is available through the Mouser Electronics website, and features an ECP5 FPGA with a 1.1 V core supply. The evaluation board can accommodate all pin-compatible ECP5 devices in the 381 ball caBGA package.

Also included with the ECP5 Versa Evaluation Board is configuration support for Lattice’s Diamond Programmer. The design software allows large complex designs to be efficiently implemented using the ECP5 FPGA family.