Posted on - 27 Comments on LicheeTang Anlogic EG4S20 FPGA Board Targets RISC-V Development

LicheeTang Anlogic EG4S20 FPGA Board Targets RISC-V Development

LicheeTang

LicheePi has already made some interested little development board in the past with products such as LicheePi Zero, and the recently-announced SD card sized LicheePi Nano board, but their  latest development board may ever be more intriguing. LicheeTang features Anlogic EG4S20 FPGA – unrelated to Amlogic – which run a RISC-V softcore,  and all is packaged in a small small form factor as we’ve come to expect with LicheePi boards. LicheeTang specifications: FPGA – Anlogic EG4S20BG256 with 20K logic unit (LUT4/LUT5 hybrid architecture), about 130KB SRAM, 64MBit SDRAM Storage – 8Mbit flash, micro SD card slot, optional SPI NOR flash Expansion Connectors FPC40P socket for RGB LCD, VGA adapter board, or high speed (12-bit 1MSPS) DAC module FPC24P socket for DVP camera, or high speed ADC module Through holes and castellated holes exposing over 130 I/Os Debugging – FPGA JTAG chip connected over micro USB port Misc – RGB LED Power Supply – 5V via micro USB port; 3-channel DCDC …

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Posted on - 2 Comments on BladeRF 2.0 USB 3.0 Software Defined Radio Launched for $480 and Up

BladeRF 2.0 USB 3.0 Software Defined Radio Launched for $480 and Up

BladeRF 2.0 Micro

Around 5 years ago, several affordable FPGA based open source software defined radio boards launched including HackRF, BladeRF x40 / x115, and  USRP B200. The company behind BladeRF has now launched an update of their boards with Blade RF 2.0 coming in two versions namely bladeRF 2.0 micro xA4 and bladeRF 2.0 micro xA9 supporting the same 47MHz to 6GHz frequency range, and 61.44MHz sampling rate, but the latter comes with a more powerful 301KLE Cyclone V FPGA. BladeRF 2.0 hardware specifications: FPGA Micro xA4 – Intel / Altera Cyclone V FPGA with 49 kLE Micro xA9 – Intel / Altera Cyclone V FPGA with 301 kLE Analog Devices RF Transceiver 47 MHz to 6 GHz frequency range 2×2 MIMO, 61.44 MHz sampling rate 56 MHz filtered bandwidth (IBW) Automatic gain control (AGC) Real- time custom gain control tables controlled via SPI and discrete external input pins Automatic IQ and DC offset correction 128-tap digital FIR filtering USB 3.0 SuperSpeed …

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Posted on - 1 Comment on UltraZed-EV Starter Kit Support Simultaneous 4K Encoding and Decoding with Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ EV MPSoC

UltraZed-EV Starter Kit Support Simultaneous 4K Encoding and Decoding with Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ EV MPSoC

UltraZed EV Starter Kit

Xilinx unveiled Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC‘s combining Arm Cortex A53/R5 cores with FPGA fabric back in 2015. and we started to see development boards and products based on the solution starting in 2017 with offerings such as AXIOM Board, TRENZ TE0808 SoM, or more recently 96Boards compliant Ultra96 development board. All last three boards have one thing in common: they all use an Zynq UltraScale+ GC MPSoC that adds a Mali-400MP2 GPU to CG MPSoC family. But there’s also a third EV family which standards for “Embedded Vision”, and adds support for 4K H.264 / H.265 hardware video codec capable of simultaneous encode and decode. The platform targets multimedia, automotive ADAS, surveillance, and other embedded vision applications. So far, I don’t think I had seen any boards based on Ultrascale+ EV MPSoC, but AVNet  – following up on their UltraZed-EG starter kit – has now launched an UltraZed-EV starter kit powered by UltraScale+ MPSoC XCZU7EV-1FBVB900E. The kit is comprised of a …

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Posted on - 1 Comment on Air-T Artificial Intelligence Radio Transceiver SDR Platform Combines NVIDIA Jetson TX2 and Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA (Crowdfunding)

Air-T Artificial Intelligence Radio Transceiver SDR Platform Combines NVIDIA Jetson TX2 and Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA (Crowdfunding)

If often write about low end and cheaper hardware on this blog, but not in this post. Deepwave Digital Air-T (Artificial Intelligence Radio – Transceiver) is a high-end software defined radio platform with continuous frequency coverage from 300 MHz to 6 GHz. The board combines AD9371 RFIC transceiver providing up to 2 x 2 MIMO of 100 MHz of receiving bandwidth, a Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA, and NVIDIA Jetson TX2 module. Air-T hardware specifications & key features: Software-defined Radio Analog Devices 9371 2×2 MIMO transceiver 2 x RX channels (100 MHz each) 2 x TX channels (100 MHz each) Auxiliary RX channels: Observation & Sniffer. Note: Can use either Observation or Sniffer at one time; utilizes one of the RX channels NVIDIA Jetson TX2 for processing 256 NVIDIA CUDA core GPU 6 CPU cores – 2x NVIDIA Denver2, 4x Arm Cortex-A57 8GB RAM 32GB eMMC flash Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA with75k logic cells External Storage – SATA, SD card slot, or via …

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Posted on - 5 Comments on Xilinx Zynq-7020 based PYNQ-Z1 Arm + FPGA Board is Meant to be Programmed with Python

Xilinx Zynq-7020 based PYNQ-Z1 Arm + FPGA Board is Meant to be Programmed with Python

PYNQ Z1

Xilinx Zynq-7000 series is a family of SoC based on Arm Cortex A9 processor coupled with FPGA fabric, and since the introduction in 2012, we’ve seen may board based on the entry-level Zynq-7010 or Zynq-7020 SoCs. Digilent PYNQ-Z1 is another Xilinx Zynq board from the company, but it does not differentiate itself by its hardware features, and instead the software part is the most interesting. The board is designed to be used with PYNQ, a new open-source framework that enables embedded programmers to exploit the capabilities of Xilinx Zynq SoCs without having to design programmable logic circuits, relying instead on Python programming. Digilent PYNQ-Z1 hardware specifications: SoC – Xilinx Zynq-7020 (XC7Z020-1CLG400C) dual core Arm Cortex-A9 processor with FPGA with 1.3 M reconfigurable gates System Memory – 512MB DDR3 Storage – Micro SD card slot, 16MB QSPI Flash with factory programmed globally unique identifier (48-bit EUI-48/64 compatible). Video – HDMI In and HDMI Out Audio – Mic in, Line Out Networking …

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Posted on - 7 Comments on Arduino Unveils its First FPGA Board with MKR Vidor 4000, Updates UNO WiFi Board with ATmega4809 MCU

Arduino Unveils its First FPGA Board with MKR Vidor 4000, Updates UNO WiFi Board with ATmega4809 MCU

Arduino has been busy with new boards announcements in the last week, as after introducing MKR WiFi 1010 and MKR NB 1500 IoT boards with respectively WiFi + Bluetooth, and NB-IoT + eMTC connectivity, the company has now unveiled two new boards. MKR Vidor 4000 is the very first official Arduino board with an FPGA, while UNO WiFi Rev2 is an upgrade of UNO WiFi board featuring the new Microchip ATmega4809 MCU and an U-blox wireless module instead of an ESP8266 chip. MKR Vidor 4000 Preliminary specifications: FPGA part FPGA – Intel Cyclone FPGA with 16K Logic Elements, 504Kbit of embedded RAM and 56 18×18 bit HW multipliers for high-speed DSP System Memory – 8 MB SDRAM Storage – 2 MB QSPI Flash (1MB for user applications) Micro HDMI connector MIPI camera connector mini PCIe connector with up to 25 user programmable pins MCU – Microchip SAMD21 Cortex-M0+ 32bit low power Arm MCU  @ 48 MHz with 256 KB flash, …

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Posted on - 7 Comments on NeTV2 Open Video Development Board Works with Encrypted and Unencrypted Video Streams (Crowdfunding)

NeTV2 Open Video Development Board Works with Encrypted and Unencrypted Video Streams (Crowdfunding)

NeTV2

Chumby NeTV was an open source hardware Linux IPTV media player based on a Xilinx Spartan FPGA and a Marvell Armada 166 processor, and unveiled in 2011. Many years have passed since then, and now Bunnie Huang has come up with a new version. The NeTV2 development board is also optimized for open digital video application, but based on a more powerful Xilinx Artik-7  FPGA, and a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ can be added for things like seamless JTAG configuration and overlay video generation. Key features and specifications: FPGA – Xilinx Artik-7 XC7A35T-2FGG484 (available with XC7A50T option during campaign only) System Memory – 512 MB RAM, 32-bit wide DDR3-800 Storage – micro SD card, 8 MB SPI  flash Video Ports 2x HDMI type A inputs 1 x HDMI type A output 1 x HDMI type D output. One input/output pair configured for in-line ‘NeTV mode’ video filtering. Max Video Bandwidth –  1920 x 1080 @ 60 Hz Connectivity – 10/100M …

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Posted on - 3 Comments on HiFive Unleashed RISC-V Linux Development Board Gets a $2000 FPGA Expansion Board

HiFive Unleashed RISC-V Linux Development Board Gets a $2000 FPGA Expansion Board

If you’re a RISC-V architecture’s enthusiast or represent a company working on products with the new ISA, you may have spent $999 or more on Hifive Unleashed RISC-V Linux development board a few months ago. You now have the opportunity to spend an extra $1,999 for HiFive Unleashed Expansion Board powered by a MicroSemi PolarFire FPGA programmed with a PCIe root port bridge, and allowing you to test all sorts of peripherals such as HDD’s & SSD’s,  HDMI output, and audio cards, network adapters, graphics cards, and so on. Expansion board specifications: FPGA – Microsemi Low Power PolarFire FPGA with 300K Logic Element 4 Gbit DDR4 x16 SPI Flash for remote FPGA updates, QSPI Flash connected to GPIO 24 lane PCIe Switch x1 PCI Express card connector x16 PCI Express card connector with 4 lanes of PCIe gen2 connected SSD M.2 connector SATA connector HDMI connector eMMC Nand Flash uSD Card Slot USB to UART bridges 2 CAN transceivers FMC …

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