14 DAY TRIAL // Avnet Electronics has just announced the availability of the Xilinx Spartan-6 LX9 FPGA microboard, a comprehensive kit created for designers who are looking to leverage the flexibility and customization capabilities of the Spartan-6 family of FPGA integrated circuits, but don't want to spend an arm and a leg in the process.
Together with the Spartan-6 field-programmable gate array (FPGA), the LX9 FPGA MicroBoard also packs 64 MB of LPDDR SDRAM memory, a 10/100Mbps Ethernet port as well as a programmable clock and two expansion ports for I/O access.
In addition, Avnet has also enclosed a license for the Xilinx software development kit (SDK) that provides an Eclipse-based environment for writing and debugging MicroBlaze code.
The whole board is powered by an ultra-small footprint power management unit from Texas Instruments with over-voltage and ESD protection.
Video output is handled by a CDCE913 TI programmable fractional PLL-based clock synthesizer that supports a wide input/output frequency range and spread-spectrum clocking.
“The Spartan-6 LX9 FPGA MicroBoard is an excellent starting point for designers of power- and cost-sensitive applications who want to leverage the flexibility and processing capabilities of FPGAs,” said Raj Seelam, senior marketing manager, Platform Solutions at Xilinx.
“Thanks to innovative co-development with TI and Avnet, we are able to provide new as well as traditional FPGA designers with the development resources they need to quickly take advantage of what FPGAs have to offer in terms of low cost, high performance and flexibility,” concludes the company's rep.
The whole board (including the USB connector) measures less than 10cm and is available order right now, while shipments will start at the end of the first quarter of 2011.
Pricing for the whole kit has been established at $89.00, making this one of the cheapest FPGA solutions available for purchase at this time.