2R Hardware & Electronics: Arria II GX-260 FPGA Development Board

Tuesday, December 04, 2012

Arria II GX-260 FPGA Development Board

The Arria II GX-260 FPGA development board provides a hardware platform that features sixteen 6.375Gbps transceivers and up to 1.25Gbps LVDS support, making them suitable for a broad array of applications in markets that include wireless, wireline, test, medical, and storage. With the Arria II GX-260 FPGA, customers can achieve the power-reduction benefits, while providing high functionality for applications with significantly higher bandwidth requirements. The device features 256,000 logic elements (LEs), 11.7Mb of embedded memory, and 612 I/Os. Furthermore, the board delivers an abundant set of on-board memory consisting of DDR2 and DDR3 memory. With protocol reference designs and an Arria II GX-260 FPGA development kit, designers can easily begin developing and prototyping their designs immediately.

Arria II GX-260 FPGA development board

Arria II GX EP2AGX260 FPGA

256,000 logic elements (LEs)

102,600 adaptive logic modules (ALMs)

11,756 Kb on-chip memory

16 high-speed transceivers

6 phase-locked loops (PLLs)

736 18x18 multipliers

128MB 16bit DDR3 device

1GB 64bit DDR2 SO-DIMM

2MB SSRAM

64MB FLASH

FPGA Configuration Circuitry

MAX II CPLD and flash fast passive parallel configuration

On-board USB-Blaster™ circuitry using the Quartus II Programmer

On-Board Clocking Circuitry

Four on-board oscillators

100MHz

Programmable oscillator, default frequency 125MHz

Programmable oscillator, default frequency 100MHz

155.52MHz

SMA connectors for external LVPECL clock input

SMA connector for clock output

General User I/O

LEDs/displays

Four user LEDs

Two-line character LCD display

One configuration-done LED

One HSMC interface transmit/receive LED

Three PCI Express LEDs

Five Ethernet LEDs

Push-buttons

One user reset (CPU reset)

One MAX II CPLD reset

One load image (program FPGA from flash)

One image select (select image to load from flash)

Two general user push-buttons

DIP switches

Four user DIP switches

Eight MAX II device control DIP switches

Power Supply

14V to 20V DC input

PCI Express edge connector power

On-board power measurement circuitry

Arria II GX-260 FPGA Development Kit CD-ROM

Design examples

PCI Express High-Performance Reference Design

PCI Express-to-DDR2 SDRAM Reference Design

Altera’s complete Design Suite DVD

Quartus II Software Development Kit Edition, includes support for Arria II GX FPGAs

Nios II Embedded Design Suite

MegaCore® IP Library includes PCI Express, Triple Speed Ethernet, SDI, and DDR3 High-Performance Controller IP cores

IP evaluation available through OpenCore Plus