Full feature development board based on Cyclone V SoC

Joerg Bertholdt, Director, Embedded Software Marketing and Planning at Altera said, “The launch of Lark Board enables developers to efficiently utilise the advantages of Cyclone V SoC architecture, density and performance, offering a full-featured and powerful development platform for embedded system design and development.”

The Lark Board features a 5CSXFC6D6 SoC FPGA, the largest SoC device in the Cyclone V SX family. This device integrates a FPGA and ARM-based dual-core Hard Processor System (HPS) that operates at speeds of up to 800 MHz and is coupled together through an AXI high-speed interconnect backbone to the FPGA fabric. A single monolithic device combines the performance and power savings of hard intellectual property with the flexibility of programmable logic.

David Shen, Chief Technology Officer of Premier Farnell said: “We are delighted with the opportunity to develop the Lark Board, which highlights Altera’s leadership in programmable logic solutions and our design capabilities in embedded products. Engineers will appreciate the power, speed and flexibility this industry leading SoC development kit provides at a price point not normally seen for full-featured FPGA based evaluation boards.”

The Lark Board provides 1GB DDR3 SDRAM to each of the HPS and FPGA as well as 4GB eMMC Flash and a Transflash card slot for mass storage. The Lark Board features several standard I/O interfaces including PCI Express, Gigabit Ethernet, USB2.0 Host ports, UART, JTAG, and 3G SDI.  The combination of HDMI, VGA and LCD screen support gives the Lark Board a competitive advantage; moreover, it supports VGA display up to 1920x1080 and 1080 HDMI digital output making it ideal for video intensive applications. It also features a 30-pin digital camera connector ideal for surveillance type applications.

Design engineers can get a tour of the Lark Board by joining a December 2 webinar ‘Developing Advanced Embedded Systems with Altera Cyclone V SoC and element14 Lark Board’ during which Todd Koelling from Altera and Craig Stiegman from element14 will discuss how its flexible architecture allows multiple configuration options and customisable hardware designs to be implemented.

The board also integrates a 12-bit high-speed and a dual-channel 3.3GHz RF/IF differential amplifier alongside a 12-bit 105MSPS high-accuracy ADC to enable analog signal amplification, filtering and sampling. The Lark Board uses an Altera Enpirion power solution to provide a stable and efficient output for all the Cyclone V SoC’s power rails.

A USB Blaster II has been integrated on the Lark Board to increase the efficiency of FPGA debugging. The onboard USB Blaster supports Quartus II and ARM DS-5 development environments. The Lark Board comes pre-installed with Yocto, an embedded distribution of Linux with other Linux distributions available to download online.