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Cheap Altera Cyclone II FPGA board — Parallax Forums

Cheap Altera Cyclone II FPGA board

LeonLeon Posts: 7,620
edited 2011-03-13 16:00 in General Discussion
Many years ago I designed my own PCB for playing about with Altera Flex 10K FPGAs. I thought of doing the same for the more recent Cyclone II chip, but I came across this Cyclone II board on eBay for $25.99 and ordered one:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=190501210627&ssPageName=STRK:MEWNX:IT

I already had a Chinese-made copy of the Altera USB-Blaster which is required for configuring Altera devices and programming their flash memories. I opted for ordinary air mail delivery ($6.90), and it took about three weeks to arrive.

The board is quite well made, and is very good value for just under $26. It's only got two layers, whereas a minimum of four layers are usually employed with FPGAs to ensure signal integrity, and the linear regulators are a bit wimpy. However, it's quite adequate for hobbyist and educational use. I connected a 5V supply to it and it immediately started flashing the three LEDs, showing that the FPGA and configuration memory were working. I then entered a simple schematic design into the free Altera Quartus II software which read the pushbutton and wrote the value to one of the LEDs, built the application, and downloaded it to the FPGA with the USB-Blaster, via the JTAG port. It worked OK, so I knew that the board was basically functional. I haven't checked downloading to the configuration memory using the AS connector, yet.

I'm designing a simple add-on board for it with a seven-segment LED and a couple of switches, so that I can implement a simple 8-bit CPU on it. I did something similar on my Flex 10K board. That used four-layers, BTW.

Anyway, if anyone is in the market for a very cheap FPGA board, I can recommend this unit.

Comments

  • UnknownUnknown
    edited 2011-03-13 06:17
    Leon,

    Can you please give us a little introduction to this device? The datasheet is only provided by the seller after purchase.

    How does it rate against other FPGA boards?

    Chuck
  • LeonLeon Posts: 7,620
    edited 2011-03-13 07:04
    It's basically just the EP2C5 FPGA chip, a 50 MHz oscillator, a 4 Mbit flash chip for the configuration memory, connectors for JTAG and AS configuration, and about 80 I/Os brought out to the four headers. The headers also have 3.3V and 1.2V supplies brought out, so add-on boards don't need an additional supply.

    The EP2C5 has 4,608 logic elements and 26 RAM blocks (nearly 120,000 bits). It also has 13 hardware multipliers and two PLLs for multiplying input clocks. See the Altera web site for full details. It's an older device, but still very useful, and is newer than many of the devices covered in the current FPGA text books.

    Other FPGA boards, like the Digilent Spartan-3 board I have, usually include things like LEDs and displays, push buttons and switches, and external SRAM or SDRAM. They cost a lot more, though - $120 or more. Something comparable using the Xilinx Spartan 3E is available from Sparkfun for $99.95!.

    A very good book to use in conjunction with this board is Rapid Prototyping of Digital Systems by Hamblen, Hall and Furman. It's actually based on the Altera UP 2 and UP3 boards which use the earlier Cyclone I chip. It's an expensive book, but I picked up a copy quite cheaply on the Amazon web site.

    Interfacing a Propeller to that board would be quite trivial, of course.
  • HollyMinkowskiHollyMinkowski Posts: 1,398
    edited 2011-03-13 12:46
    That board looks like fun :-)
    Cheap price too!

    The seller also has an ethernet module for just 16.99 delivered.
    http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=190502377580&refid=store&ssPageName=STORE:HTMLBUILDER:SIMPLEITEM

    Found a new copy of that book for 14.99 on Amazon from an associate seller...
    http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0792374398/ref=si_aps_sup_olp?ie=UTF8&qid=1300045429&sr=8-1&condition=new
  • LeonLeon Posts: 7,620
    edited 2011-03-13 13:47
    That's actually an older version, I bought that some years ago. This is the one you need for the current Quartus II software:

    http://www.amazon.com/Rapid-Prototyping-Digital-Systems-Quartus%C2%AE/dp/0387277285/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1300049145&sr=1-3

    I think I paid the equivalent of about $30 for it.
  • TubularTubular Posts: 4,717
    edited 2011-03-13 15:25
    Thats a good find, Leon. The us$40 deal for that board with usb jtag bit blaster also looks good.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 7,620
    edited 2011-03-13 16:00
    I paid much more than that for a USB-Blaster clone a couple of years ago.

    I designed my own parallel port Blaster several years ago, and made quite a lot of money selling them to a company that supplied them with their FPGA hardware to customers.
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