Artix-7 50T FPGA Development Board Reviews
FPGA is a field programmable gate array, which is a kind of programmable logic device. With the advancement of technology and the continuous development of EDA design tools, the threshold (lower cost of learning and cost) of FPGAs is getting lower and lower, and it has become one of the mainstream platforms for implementing digital systems. The integration of FPGAs is getting higher and higher, and the corresponding power consumption and cost are decreasing, which makes them widely used in various fields. Like the butterfly effect, more application fields have also spawned various FPGA vendors. It is also a good thing for the products to be more and more detailed. For hardware engineers, the advantage is that they can be cost-effectively selected on demand, but it also means device selection and resources. The assessment needs to be more cautious.
When an engineer wants to choose an FPGA development board, the first thing to ask is what we can get and what are we going to do with it? For beginners, FPGAs are quite daunting, but if you have a good evaluation board as a start, you can achieve twice the result with half the effort. Perhaps the introduction of FPGA is not as difficult as the legend. Today, Aiban.com will introduce a general-purpose, low-cost FPGA development kit, the ArTIx-7 50T FPGA evaluation kit from AVNET.
The ArTIx-7 50T evaluation kit is based on the Xilinx-7 series FPGA digital development platform based on Xilinx 28nm. At present, Xilinx's FPGA product line is very rich, covering low, medium and high-end three grades and spanning 45nm to 16nm multi-generation process. .
It includes the SPARTAN6, ARTIX-7 and Zynq-7000 ALL Programmable Soc for the low-end series, and the mid- to high-end product line for different needs and the powerful heterogeneous processing platform Zynq UtraScale+ MPSoC.
The Artix-7 device achieves low cost and low power consumption in a 28nm process and is optimized for optimal performance and power consumption in the design. In addition, Artix-7 devices are very significant and integrated. AMS, transceiver and other functions can be widely used in software-defined radio, machine vision photography and low-end wireless backhaul.
After a basic understanding of the main board of the development board, we actually look at the Artix-7 50T evaluation kit. Since the board is designed by AVNET, the AVNET logo can be seen on the box.
In addition to the evaluation board, the inside of the box is also equipped with a network cable and two MicroUSB cables. Some people may have doubts. Why are two MicroUSB cables equipped? In fact, one is used for serial port output and power supply, and the other is used for download and debugging of the board.
The board is a dark red PCB board, the overall is not too big, the size of the adult palm, the work is very solid. The manuals and other materials of the Artix-7 50T FPGA evaluation kit can be downloaded free of charge on the official website of AVNET. It is worth mentioning that AVNET provides a complete circuit diagram of the board, which is very good for the circuit design of the Artix-7 series FPGA chip. Reference.
The resources on the evaluation board are as follows.
10 user LEDs
12 connected to Pmod
16 AMS input
200 MHz LVCMOS Oscillator (System Clock)
256MB DDR3 SDRAM
32 KB I2C EEPROM
32 MB QSPI Flash
4 for power monitoring circuits
5 user push button switches
512b EEPROM with SHA-256 authentication engine
6 Digital-compatible PmodTM interfaces supporting 48 user I/O pins
8 user DIP switches
Dual 10/100 Ethernet interface
JTAG programming / configuration port
Pairing to accommodate double width Pmod
Wiring as a differential pair
Support IEEE1588
USB-UART interface
Xilinx PC4 and Digilent SMT2
Xilinx XC7A50T-1FTG256C
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