ZTEX Releases Spartan 6 FPGA Board: USB-FPGA-Module 1.11 with 64 MByte DDR SDRAM, USB 2.0 Interface and a Lot of I/O

(PRWEB) July 30, 2010

ZTEX (see http://www.ztex.de), a leading producer of FPGA boards with USB 2.0 interfaces, announces the availability of the Spartan 6 based USB-FPGA-Module 1.11 (see http://www.ztex.de/usb-fpga-1/usb-fpga-1.11.e.html) with 64 MByte onboard DDR SDRAM. The price for modules with Xilinx Spartan 6 FPGA XC6SLX16 is 109 EUR (approx. 139 USD). Variants with XC6SLX9 and XC6SLX25 are planned for autumn 2010.

ZTEX modules are mainly intended for prototyping and small series products. In combination with various extension boards they can be used as development / evaluation platform.

The main features of the Spartan 6 USB-FPGA-Module 1.11 are:

•     High-Speed (480 MBit/s) USB interface via Mini-USB connector
• Cypress CY7C68013A EZ-USB-Microcontroller
• Xilinx Spartan 6 XC6SLX16, XC6SLX25 or XC6SLX9 FPGA
• 90 General Purpose I/O's (GPIO):

         o 40 FPGA GPIO's with variable I/O voltage
         o 42 FPGA GPIO's with 3.3V I/O voltage
         o 8 EZ-USB FX2 GPIO's

• 15 special I/O's (JTAG, interrupts, timers, I2C, ...)
• 64 MByte DDR SDRAM

         o Up to 800 MByte/s data rate
         o Easy to use 6 port hard memory controller included Spartan 6

• MicroSD socket for standard and high capacity (SDHC) microSD cards
• 128 Kbit EEPROM memory (can be used to for firmware loading)

An Open Source SDK (see http://www.ztex.de/firmware-kit/index.e.html) is available for rapid development of Firmware and host Software. It supports

•     FPGA configuration / programming via USB (No JTAG adapters or other additional utilities required.),
• access to EEPROM and Flash memory,
• FPGA configuration / programming from Flash memory,
• and contains many examples.

The SDK package consists in three parts:

The Firmware Development Kit for the EZ-USB microcontroller allows to specify all required settings (e.g. Endpoint configuration) by a few macro commands. The necessary USB descriptors and the descriptor handling routines are generated automatically.

The host Software API is written in Java and allows the development of platform independent host software. The access to the devices using other programming languages is easily possible using the libusb library.

The examples section contains a lot of examples, e.g. for accessing the DDR SDRAM using the hard memory controller included Spartan 6 and an example of the implementation of a fast USB 2.0 interface.

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