Altium FPGA LiveDesign Kit -Designing with FPGAs （1）

Published:2011/8/17 21:31:00 Author:Phyllis From:SeekIC

By Paul Goossens

Modern circuits make ever more extensive use of FPGAs. Special software is required when designing with these devices. One of the companies that produce such software is Altium. In order to allow their software to be evaluated, they offer a cheap evaluation kit. Once the evaluation period has expired, the kit is still very useful as a development platform for your own designs!





Altium’s background is that of a developer of various software products for electronics designers. Their product range contains, among other things, compilers for microcontrollers, schematic and PCB drawing software and FPGA design software. To allow their software to be evaluated, Altium has offered for some time now a development platform called nanoBoard together with an evaluation version of their software. Recently, they started offering a slimmed-down version of this board plus the above-mentioned software, which goes by the name of LiveDesign. This evaluation board costs 99 Euro (approx. £68) (excl. P&P). You get quite a bit for this money.

Contents

The kit contains, in addition to the development board itself, a mains power adapter and a programming cable. There are also 2 ribbon cables included that allow the I/O connectors of the board to be connected to your own expansion PCB. From the software perspective there are four CDs. These contain the evaluation software, examples and two presentations for Altium products. Finally, the box contains various items of documentation.

It is very important NOT to discard the docket on the packaging carton. This contains the customer number and release-code that you will need when installing the software.

This installation itself is very straightforward, but it is still useful to read through the installation instructions first. Especially since in addition to the Altium software, you will also need to install software from the manufacturer of the FPGA (depending on your choice this is either Altera or Xilinx).
Hardware

The development board is provided with a number of standard I/O features, such as we are accustomed to seeing on these kinds of boards (also refer to side bar). However one thing is striking, it is possible to adjust the corner frequency of the output filter of the DAC with a resistor array.

The heart of the circuit is the FPGA, of course. Depending on your choice, this is either a Cyclone-FPGA (EP1C12F324C8) from Altera or a Spartan-3 (XC3S400-5FG456C) from Xilinx. As you will see shortly, these two FPGAs are very powerful!

Otherwise there is not much more to say about the hardware, except that with our board the wires between the speakers and the PCB had become disconnected. Fortunately, this was easily fixed with a little bit of soldering!

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