| Lots
of Features ! |
The above illustrates
the functional block diagram of the Foundation Development Board.
The board has dimensions of 7.25" x 5.5" and uses 4
layer PCB.
|
The package of the EP1K100
is 208-pin PQFP, and provides 147 user IOs
The FDB contains all of the essential peripherals most commonly
used in medium scale FPGA development board. These includes:
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Video DAC
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A 30MHz video allows
minimum resolution of 640 x 480 pixels. This device contain a
24 bit DAC, allowing a color depth of 16Million.
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Audio band stereo
out with Stereo Volume Control
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Contains all of the
conditioning circuits. Allows stereo playback at CD quality (44KHz),
using dual 1-Bit DAC technology. Ideal for MP3 designs !
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RS-232 port and Level
Shifter
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Allows any host (PC)
to communicate to the board.
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PS/2 keyboard port
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Any keyboard which connects
to a PC can be connected in this port.
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Mouse port
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Any mouse which connects
to a PC can be connected to this port.
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SDRAM - 4M x 32
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Plenty of data source
built right on the board. The SDRAM is configured in 32 bit bus
to handle system designs of upto 32 bits.
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Data FLASH 512KByte
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This is shared as the
FPGA configuration data and also for other permanent data source,
such as microprocessor’s code. A dedicated microcontroller
(Atmel AVR) handles the access to the Data Flash. The EP1K100
only consumes about 128KByte, so the rest of capacity can be
used by your design.
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SODIMM
|
For designs needing
lots of memory, you can ues the SODIMM connector. Virtually any
Notebook/Laptop SODIMM will work. Additionally, you can use the
SPD (serial presence detect) EEPROM of the SODIMM if you so choose
to. You wil never run out of memory space !.
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SRAM 128K x 16
|
256KBytes
of SRAM organized as 128K x 16 is also available for your designs.
The SRAM bus also brought out to the System Expansion Bus connector,
so you can add your own memory mapped peripherals.
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Expansion Connectors
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2 expansion connectors
allows your board to be infinitely expandable. The System Expansion
Bus connector is handy for adding IDE drives, USB controllers,
etc. The Add-On Expansion Connector allows you to add a secondaty
FPGA if you run out of space on the EP1K100.
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On board power regulators.
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The board contains 3
voltage regulators: 5V, 3.3V and 2.5V. All you need is to supply
a 9Vdc to the board !
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Multiple Clocks
|
The board contains not
just 1, but 3 clock sources: 24MHz, 40MHz and 53.125MHz. Your
design can choose any or all of these clock sources for a multi-clock
domain systems.
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| Ready
to Go Right Out of the Box ! |
| |
| The Foundation Development
Board is the only board which comes with a fully functional,
fully featured core for free. The board comes with Foundation
CoPC (Computer on Programmable Chip). The figure below illustrates
the block diagram of Foundation CoPC. |
| The Developer's
FCoPC Package is available for those who would like to design
systems based on the FCoPC. This package contains all source
RTL, all C++/C source code of all supporting applications. Full
manual, and support. You can modify the RTL to suit your particular
need. Or you can extract and use the blocks that you only need. |
| Even if you do not
purchase the FCoPC Developers Package, the supplied core is yours
to keep, and since it is a full-featured design, you can write
embedded firmware or applications for your own projects ! |
|
Block Diagram of the Core supplied
with the FDB
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| The Foundation
CoPC (FCoPC) is a fully functional 8-bit computer system. It
is not
a toy !! The FCoPC contains
a custom 8 bit microcontroller based on a CISC CPU running at
40MHz. This is a slightly modified version of the PopCorn microprocessor
available from this website. The FCoPC also features a complete
SDRAM/SODIMM Controller which runs at 53.125MHz. Finally a fully
featured VGA Controller with text and graphics mode is present. |
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PopCorn-V3 Microcontroller
|
This is based on a fully
verified 8-bit CISC microprocessor IP. It provides 5 addressing
modes, real-time interrupt, bus wait state and more. A table-driven
assembler is supplied with it, along with TCL (Tool Control Language)
Monitor. The microcontrolle runs at 40MHz. This core occupied
1/20 of the EP1K100 gate capacity. The microcontroller contains
these peripherals:
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16 bit hardware integer multiplier
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Programmable baud UART
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LCD Display Controller
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Mouse Controller
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Audio Processor
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Interrupt Controller
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SDRAM Interface controller
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Programmable Timer
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LED Flasher
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VGA Graphics/Text
Controller
|
This is a fully verified
VGA controller. Directly compatible with standard VGA monitors.
Unlike a typical VGA controller, this controller accesses the
video buffer during the horizontal retrace, thus providing plenty
of bandwidth for the micro to access the video buffer. The VGA
controller includes a DMA engine which interfaces to the SDRAM/SODIMM
Controller. The VGA Controller runs at 24MHz, and contains all
multi-clock domain handling logic, making it scalable to any
clock. The VGA controller supports 4 video modes:
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Text Mode
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In the text mode, it
can display 80 characters by 40 rows. Each character is composed
of 2-bytes: one byte for the ASCII code, and 1 byte for attirbute.
The attribute ibyte is composed of 3 foreground bits, 4 background
colors and 1 bit for blink mode. All character "image"
is stored on a small RAM, and can be overriten to allow any custom
character set. Each character is composed of 8 rows by 8 colum
pixels. The default character map can be overwritten by any microprocessor
during run time. The text controller uses color-map such that
all text color can be modified instantly without the need for
rewriting to the text buffer. On top of all this, a dedicated
hardware scrolling logic allows minimum software effort to achieve
smooth text scrolling.
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Graphics Mode 1
|
The Graphics Mode 1
has a resolution of 512 x 480 pixels, where each pixel is 16bit,
allowing 64K color depth. Stunning graphics are capable - all
on your imagination. Video scrolling is supported in hardware
such that you can scroll a full graphics top to bottom of the
screen of vice-versa. Remember the video games where the background
scrolls from bottom to top of the screen ?
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Graphics Mode 2
|
In this mode, the resolution
is 340 x 240 pixels, where each pixel is 24bits, allowing a photo-realistic
16Million color depth. The pixels are "packed" in the
video memory to optimize memory usage. But this is handled by
the hardware, so you don't even have to think about "packing/unpacking".
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Graphics Mode 3
|
In this mode, the resolution
is 340 x 240 pixels, where each pixel is 16 bits, allowing a
color depth of 64K. This mode consumes the least amount of memory
per screen. If your design is tight on memory, go for this mode.
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SDRAM/SODIMM Controller
|
This is a multi-clock
domain memory controller which allows "clients" access
to the SDRAM/SODIMM. The datapath of the controller is 32bits
on the SDRAM side. On the client side, it can be 8, 16, 24 or
32 bits. The memory controller allows 2 kinds of "clients".
The SDRAM controller runs at 53.125MHz. But the clients can run
at any clock.
|
Single access clients,
and Burst access clients. The clients is allowed to have any
clock domain. The Single access clients are the kind which request
upto 32bit of read and write access to the SDRAM. The PopCorn
Microcontroller is interfaced to the SDRAM controller as Single
access client at 40MHz.
|
The Burst Access client
are the kind which accesses the SDRAM with several tens or hundreds
of bytes of data. The VGA Controller and the Audio Processor
are interfaced to the SDRAM as Burst Access clients at 24MHz
and 40MHz respectively.
|
Adding more Single/Burst
clients is as easy as instantiating more "client agents".
This core has taken all the headche out of memory controller
design.
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| Applications |
Because of the on-board
peripherals, the Foundation Development Board has many uses:
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ASIC Emulation
|
Single Board Computer
|
MP3 player
|
Microprocessor Development
|
Video Editing system
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| Frequently
Asked Questions |
| |
| 1.
Apart from the board, what other hardware do I need for a development
environment? |
You
will need a DC power supply, an RS-232 serial cable to connect
the board to your PC, and lots of enthusiasm. Optionally you
may find the ByteBlaster (or clone) cable come in handy.
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| 2.
The SODIMM module is not included in the kit. Can I do without? |
Absolutely.
The Foundation Board already comes with 16MBytes of SDRAM. You
will need the SODIMM if you intend to use it in your projects.
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| 3.
Can I use a SODIMM for notebooks/laptops ? |
Yes.
In fact, any laptop/notebook SODIMM will work just fine.
You even have the option of using the SPD (serial presence detect)
EEPROM of the SODIMM. It is all up to your creative power of
your design.
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| 4.
How many MBytes SODIMM should I use? |
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| 5.
Is development-software included (or downloadable) for the Altera
chip? or do I need to purchase a commercial package myself? |
The
development software is not included with the board, but you
can download free of charge from Altera
website.
Alternatively, if you already have purchased a develpment software
from Altera you may use that too. Just make sure you version
of the software can support Acex 1K devices.
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| 6.
Do you intend to sell assembled boards? |
Currently,
only fully assembled boards are sold.
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7.
I am a hobbyist looking for a sort of starter-kit to play around
with
Microprocessor cores. Your work seem like a good start |
The Foundation Development
Board is ideal for this. It has all the common peripherals for
a computer system: large SDRAM memory, generous SRAM, audio capability,
video capability, mouse port, keyboard port, serial port, etc.
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| 8.
How does the FPGA in the board get configured ? |
There
are 2 ways the FPGA is configured. You can configure it using
the ByteBlaster cable from your PC. This will send the bitstream
directly to the FPGA. Note that if you lose power, you need to
do this again. You need to use the Altera software to download
the bitsream. Alternatively, you can download the bitsteam to
the on-board flash memory. Once downloaded, the FPGA will be
automatically configured at power-on or when you hit one of the
front switches. The software need to download the bitstream file
to the on-board flash is included with the board. A DLL (Windows
only) is also included such that you can use it on your own application
software. You will need the serial RS-232 cable for this.
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| 9.
What makes this board any different from all other boards out
there ? |
The Foundation Board
is a low-cost "minimalistic" yet full featured and
expandable board. Also, it is the only general purpose
FPGA development board (I know of), which comes with a full fledged
Computer system core ready to work out of the box.
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| 10.
Can I extend the board with my own circuits ? |
Absolutely. There are
two main expansion connectors. The System Expansion bus is along
the bottom edge of the board, and connects to the SRAM and the
FPGA. This is intented to be used like a typical "system"
bus of a computer system. You would connect a memory-mapped peripheral
in this bus. Examples are floppy disk controller, IDE controller,
etc. The other expansion connector is on the back side of the
board. 2 low-profile 90-pin connectors brings out just about
every single pin of the FPGA. The intended use of this connector
is to add another FPGA using a daugher card in a co-processor
configuration.
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| 11.
How many clock domains are on the board ? |
There are 3 clock domains
in the board: 40MHz, 24MHz and 53MHz. All these clocks are
connected to the FPGA and to the various devices on the board.
Each of these clock has a "jumper" such that you can
bypass it with another clock source.
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| 12.
What is included in the Developers FCoPC Kit ? |
The Developers FCoPC
Kit comes in a CD which contains the full Verilog source code
for the entire FCoPC design. In addition, the Altera Project
directory is supplied, so that the user can simple open the project
from the Altera Max+PlusII. Also all of the support software
tools source code are included. These are: the assembler, the
character map generator, and the "fnd_tcl". The support
source code runs in Microsoft Visual C++.
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| 13.
What is included in the Foundation Board Package ? |
The Package includes
the Board, the schematic, printed manuals, and a CD containing
support executable tools which includes: "fnd_tcl",
assembler, character map generator and demo scripts.
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| 14.
How do I buy the Board ? |
Send an email to cmosexod@ix.netcom.com
with your full name, shipping address and preferred shipping
method.
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| 15.
how do I pay for the Board ? |
You do not have to make
the payment until you get the package delivered to you. At that
point you can make the payment using Paypal (credit card), WesternUnion,
personal checks (USA and Canada only).
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