Date: 06/05/2010

FPGA expansion board from TI for evaluating M2M parallel interface

Texas Instruments has unveiled the Stellaris FPGA Expansion Board for the DK-LM3S9B96 development kit to provide high-speed interface to external processing units. Evaluation of high bandwidth machine-to-machine (M2M) parallel interface capability of Stellaris microcontroller's (MCU) flexible External Peripheral Interface (EPI) can be done using this board. It provides data widths of up to 32 bits and data rates of up to 150 MB per second. Video processing is handled by a FPGA or DSP and encoded images are communicated via the on-chip Ethernet MAC+PHY of a Stellaris MCU. The board consists of a quickstart application that can show the FPGA's camera-captured and FPGA-processed video on the large, 3.5-inch touchscreen display of the DK-LM3S9B96.

The board can provide EPI operation at 50 MHz for large amount of data logging and analysis. This Board features Xilinx Spartan 3E FPGA with 100k system gates, 1/13" CMOS VGA (640x480) Color Camera Module, 1 x 6 header for FPGA programming and Xilinx JTAG connector, 1 MB of asynchronous 10 nsec SRAM for graphics/video buffers, 1 kilobit of I2C memory for storing configuration data.
8 FPGA test pads provide 5 inputs, 3 I/Os available for user prototyping of application-specific FPGA processing tasks.
Video and motion software includes color motion video displayed at QVGA (320 x 240) resolution, graphical on-screen-display overlaid on moving video, widget-based touchscreen user interface using the StellarisWare Graphics Library, freeze/resume motion with screen capture, as well as brightness, saturation, tint/hue, and sharpness picture controls


Price: DK-LM3S9B96-FPGA is priced at US$199

Availability: Now

For more information visit: http://www.ti.com/fpgaboard-pr-sw.