Felixstowe, Suffolk, UK – 30 September 2013 – Bugblat announced the PIF FPGA board for the Raspberry Pi (RPi) credit-card sized single-board computer.
The PIF board brings to the RPi an instant-on, non-volatile, high performance FPGA from Lattice Semiconductor’s MachXO2 range, a perfect target for experimenting with FPGA design, for developing design options, and for implementing custom hardware functionality.
The MachXO2 is a potent piece of silicon, with up to 6864 LUTs (depending of the PIF model), fifty four 512×18 RAM blocks that can be driven in parallel, a PLL that can do fractional synthesis, hard coded I2C, SPI, and Timer/Counter blocks, and 240Kbits of user Flash alongside the configuration Flash.
An onboard regulator powers the 3.3V FPGA from the RPi’s 5V supply and there’s a JTAG controller on the RPi I2C bus through which you can recover a bricked FPGA. The RPi SPI bus is used to to rewrite the FPGA’s configuration flash memory. Both the SPI bus and the I2C bus can read and write registers in the FPGA, so you can control the behavior of your FPGA application logic.
The MachXO2 is supported by Lattice Diamond, the compile plus place and route software package that is a free download from Lattice Semiconductor. The output from Diamond is a JEDEC file. Downloading the JEDEC to the FPGA’s onboard Flash is the job of a Python program which is supplied with the PIF.
The PIF board comes with example FPGA designs that flash the onboard red and green LEDs. And one of the examples shows how to load a design into the FPGA, then control that design via a web page.
Quantity 1, the PIF board cost $24.99. More information at http://www.bugblat.com/products/pif
About FPGAs FPGAs are programmable digital chips. Some of the features of the PIF FPGA are:
- lookup tables (LUTs) to implement digital logic
- flip flops for storage
- routing tracks to connect everything together
- specialist resources such as SRAM blocks, PLLs, and hard-coded I2C/SPI communications channels.
About Bugblat
Bugblat specializes in development system design, including logic analyzers and development boards for OEM customers and for direct sale. For more on Bugblat, please visit www.bugblat.com.
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