The FPGA-384 board.

The FPGA-384 board is a small and low cost introduction to the world of FPGA's and Verilog. Designed to be the perfect starter board with three coloured LED's to provide some instant visual feedback.

It is shipped with two types of connector for your favourite CPU host. One is for easy connections to a breadboard and the Arduino series of microcontrollers, and the other is a socket so that it can be directly plugged into a Raspberry Pi IO header. You will need to pick one set of connectors or the other and solder them to the board depending on your host preference. Open source software provided on this site can be used to program the board for either of the two host options.

A number of example Verilog tutorials have been made to make getting started a breeze. These start with a simple LED flasher and go through counters, a PRNG, bit pattern matching, RS232 serial, and I2C interfaces.

Every FPGA is reprogrammable from the point of power on reset state. And you can program the board to a new state using the host CPU each time it is powered up.

But this board additionally includes a small Flash memory IC so that your desired FPGA configuration can be sent to the Flash memory and then when the board is powered up it can be made to fetch the program from Flash. In this way, you can set the configuration of your board using your CPU and then remove it from the host, apply power and it will boot to that configured state. The board would then act as a stand alone electronic building block for your signal processing project.

The open source software to program the Flash memory IC with your configuration is also avaliable on this site.

You may clock the FPGA from the host using one of the hosts IO lines. But the board has a 16 MHz clock generator fitted so that it can run on its own without a CPU host clocking it.

Where to buy...

The FPGA-384 board is available at the following stores. Click on the icon to go to the page:

Ask us...

You can contact Silicon Frog about the board and its availability using email:

sales10@siliconfrog.co.uk