Evaluation board enables rapid prototyping of ECP5 FPGA designs

Mouser is now stocking the ECP5 Versa Evaluation Board from Lattice Semiconductor. Part of the ECP5 Versa Development Kit (LFE5-85E-PB-EVN), the evaluation board enables developers to experiment with the features of Lattice Semiconductor's ECP5 field-programmable gate array (FPGA), including PCI Express, Gigabit Ethernet, DDR3, and generic SERDES performance. The evaluation board helps designers to rapidly prototype and test ECP5 designs, and is optimized to deliver the high-performance features found in the ECP5 family of FPGA devices, including the enhanced DSP architecture, high-speed SERDES, and high-speed source synchronous interfaces. The evaluation board was developed using a half-length PCI Express form-factor, which allows demonstration of the PCI Express x1 interconnection. The board features a USB-B connection for the UART and device programming, and comes equipped with 128M Serial SPI Flash, 1GByte DDR3 memory components (64Mbyte x 16), two RJ45 jacks that interface to a 10/100/1000 Ethernet to RGMII and an expansion mezzanine interconnection for prototyping. Other design features of the board include switches, LEDs and displays for demo purposes, easy power measurements, a 14-segment alpha-numeric display, and onboard reference clock sources. The ECP5 device family covers look-up-table (LUT) capacity to 84K logic elements and supports up to 365 user I/Os. The FPGAs are suitable for a wide range of high-volume, high-speed, and low-cost Digital Signal Processing (DSP) applications. Typical programmable logic functions used in these applications are Finite Impulse Response (FIR) filters, Fast Fourier Transforms (FFT) functions, Correlators, Reed-Solomon/Turbo/Convolution encoders and decoders. The pre-engineered source synchronous logic implemented in the ECP5 device family also supports a broad range of interface standards, including DDR2/3, LPDDR2/3, XGMII and 7:1 LVDS.