2R Hardware & Electronics: Nexys 4 DDR Artix-7 FPGA: Trainer Board Recommended for ECE Curriculum

Thursday, March 10, 2016

Nexys 4 DDR Artix-7 FPGA: Trainer Board Recommended for ECE Curriculum

The Nexys 4 DDR is a drop-in replacement for our cellular RAM-based Nexys boards. Featuring the same Artix™-7 field programmable gate array (FPGA) from Xilinx®, the Nexys 4 DDR is a ready-to-use digital circuit development platform designed to bring additional industry applications into the classroom environment. The Artix-7 FPGA is optimized for high performance logic, and offers more capacity, higher performance, and more resources than earlier designs. With its large, high-capacity FPGA (Xilinx part number XC7A100T-1CSG324C) and collection of USB, Ethernet, and other ports, the Nexys 4 DDR can host designs ranging from introductory combinational circuits to powerful embedded processors. Several built-in peripherals, including an accelerometer, a temperature sensor, MEMs digital microphone, speaker amplifier and plenty of I/O devices allow the Nexys 4 DDR to be used for a wide range of designs without needing any other components. The most notable improvement is the replacement of the 16 MiB CellularRAM with a 128 MiB DDR2 SDRAM memory. Digilent will provide a VHDL reference module that wraps the complexity of a DDR2 controller and is backwards compatible with the asynchronous SRAM interface of the CellularRAM, with certain limitations.

The Nexys 4 DDR is compatible with Xilinx's new high-performance Vivado® Design Suite as well as the ISE® toolset, which includes ChipScope™ and EDK. Xilinx offers free WebPACK™ versions of these toolsets, so designs can be implemented at no additional cost.