Cheap Altera dev board with LVDS-compatible connector?

[Allan Wang]

I'm looking for a cheap Altera dev board with DDR RAM and an LVDS
compatible connector. However, it seems like the cheapest one is the
$1000 "Cyclone III FPGA Development Kit".

I initially thought that the $200 "Cyclone III FPGA Starter Kit" would
work since it has HSMC, but the manual states that it is only intended
for CMOS signals and has no provisions for differential pairs.

So does there exist a board that meets my requirements that is less
than $500? I know Xilinx does (the Digilent Atlys, which has great
specs), but I'd like to develop for the Cyclone 3/4 because they
support DDR DIMM's while the Spartans do not. If there doesn't exist
such a dev board, it seems to me like there's a huge gap in their line-
up.

What I want to do is make a daughtercard board for an 11-bit ADC, at
200MHz DDR. I need twelve LVDS pairs. Perhaps I could just try using
the starter kit board and see if the non-differential pair routing
will still work, but I don't want to just toss $200 away either.

 

[Fredxx]

"Allan Wang" <allanvv@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:b69383b3-ad53-4e2c-a9b8-03580cbf6d60@g25g2000yqn.googlegroups.com...

So does there exist a board that meets my requirements that is less
than $500? I know Xilinx does (the Digilent Atlys, which has great
specs), but I'd like to develop for the Cyclone 3/4 because they
support DDR DIMM's while the Spartans do not. If there doesn't exist
such a dev board, it seems to me like there's a huge gap in their line-
up.

I could have sworn ("Ł$%^) that the Spartan series have DDR support?

BICBW??

 

[Brian Drummond]

On Fri, 7 Jan 2011 14:53:51 -0000, "Fredxx" <fredxx@spam.com> wrote:

"Allan Wang" <allanvv@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:b69383b3-ad53-4e2c-a9b8-03580cbf6d60@g25g2000yqn.googlegroups.com...


So does there exist a board that meets my requirements that is less
than $500? I know Xilinx does (the Digilent Atlys, which has great
specs), but I'd like to develop for the Cyclone 3/4 because they
support DDR DIMM's while the Spartans do not. If there doesn't exist
such a dev board, it seems to me like there's a huge gap in their line-
up.


I could have sworn ("Ł$%^) that the Spartan series have DDR support?

BICBW??

Spartan-3 can be made to drive a DIMM, up to a certain speed.

Spartan-6 on the other hands, has a dedicated DDR interface core which connects
to several individual DDR2 (3) DRAM chips, but won't support a DIMM. I believe
the issue is that timings are calibrated assuming individual address/ctrl lines
for each chip, but they are commoned in a DIMM.

It might be possible to implement the old style DDR controller in S6 and just
ignore the dedicated core. I recall a hint here several months ago to "contact
your friendly FAE" if you wanted to learn more about it, but there were no
posted follow-ups.

I can't help feeling Xilinx dropped the ball with the S6 and DDR memory.

- Brian

 

[John Adair]

Allan

The problem with doing boards with DIMM sockets is the I/O count
needed is not far off 100 I/O. Cheaper end boards tend to have FPGAs
with 100-300 I/O. This leads to a board with limited other features so
there usually isn't a lot of logic in doing a dev board with these
restrictions for most manufacturers. As soon as you go into boards
based on FPGAs that have 300+ I/O they tend to based on the expensive
end of Spartan/Cyclone etc or worse still based on the performance
families like Virtex or Stratix.

I would ask why you want to use a DDR DIMM. You could get the same
performance with DDR2 or DDR3 running at faster rates but a narrower
interface and that is the concept behind many of our FPGA development
boards. If it's size then the DIMM does tend to win although we have
some single chip DDR3 designs coming that will give 256 Mbyte and
later on 512 Mbyte densities.

John Adair
Enterpoint Ltd. - Home of Raggedstone3. The Cyclone IV GX Development
Board.

On Jan 7, 5:09 am, Allan Wang <alla...@gmail.com> wrote:

I'm looking for a cheap Altera dev board with DDR RAM and an LVDS
compatible connector. However, it seems like the cheapest one is the
$1000 "Cyclone III FPGA Development Kit".

I initially thought that the $200 "Cyclone III FPGA Starter Kit" would
work since it has HSMC, but the manual states that it is only intended
for CMOS signals and has no provisions for differential pairs.

So does there exist a board that meets my requirements that is less
than $500? I know Xilinx does (the Digilent Atlys, which has great
specs), but I'd like to develop for the Cyclone 3/4 because they
support DDR DIMM's while the Spartans do not. If there doesn't exist
such a dev board, it seems to me like there's a huge gap in their line-
up.

What I want to do is make a daughtercard board for an 11-bit ADC, at
200MHz DDR. I need twelve LVDS pairs. Perhaps I could just try using
the starter kit board and see if the non-differential pair routing
will still work, but I don't want to just toss $200 away either.

 

[Allan Wang]

Is there no demand for an inexpensive dev board with DIMM sockets for
the purpose of having large memory? (say, two DIMMs for 4GB total).
Does the higher initial dev cost, and higher pin count FPGA really
justify these boards being at least $1500+?

The 780-pin count Cyclone is around $100 and seems to have enough IO
to interface with a DIMM and have plenty of pins left over.

On Jan 7, 6:16 pm, John Adair <g...@enterpoint.co.uk> wrote:

Allan

The problem with doing boards with DIMM sockets is the I/O count
needed is not far off 100 I/O. Cheaper end boards tend to have FPGAs
with 100-300 I/O. This leads to a board with limited other features so
there usually isn't a lot of logic in doing a dev board with these
restrictions for most manufacturers. As soon as you go into boards
based on FPGAs that have 300+ I/O they tend to based on the expensive
end of Spartan/Cyclone etc or worse still based on the performance
families like Virtex or Stratix.

I would ask why you want to use a DDR DIMM. You could get the same
performance with DDR2 or DDR3 running at faster rates but a narrower
interface and that is the concept behind many of our FPGA development
boards. If it's size then the DIMM does tend to win although we have
some single chip DDR3 designs coming that will give 256 Mbyte and
later on 512 Mbyte densities.

John Adair
Enterpoint Ltd. - Home of Raggedstone3. The Cyclone IV GX Development
Board.

On Jan 7, 5:09 am, Allan Wang <alla...@gmail.com> wrote:







I'm looking for a cheap Altera dev board with DDR RAM and an LVDS
compatible connector. However, it seems like the cheapest one is the
$1000 "Cyclone III FPGA Development Kit".

I initially thought that the $200 "Cyclone III FPGA Starter Kit" would
work since it has HSMC, but the manual states that it is only intended
for CMOS signals and has no provisions for differential pairs.

So does there exist a board that meets my requirements that is less
than $500? I know Xilinx does (the Digilent Atlys, which has great
specs), but I'd like to develop for the Cyclone 3/4 because they
support DDR DIMM's while the Spartans do not. If there doesn't exist
such a dev board, it seems to me like there's a huge gap in their line-
up.

What I want to do is make a daughtercard board for an 11-bit ADC, at
200MHz DDR. I need twelve LVDS pairs. Perhaps I could just try using
the starter kit board and see if the non-differential pair routing
will still work, but I don't want to just toss $200 away either.

 

[John Adair]

Allan

The problem is that there is limited demand but for that exact
configuration that you want so the market is very small. Typically it
might cost $30K to launch even a simple board like this for a
manufacturer like us. So if you only think you might sell only 100 in
the product lifetime that is $300 you have to recover off every board
you sell on top of the manufacture, profit, and risk costs. Suddenly
you have a board that is heading to sell at $500+. Obviously if the
numbers change and you think you can sell 1000 boards the launch cost
per board then drops to $30 and you might have a $300-$400 sell price.

Going to the $1500 boards these typically will have an even higher
development cost and market will not be enormous. Typically if you
think that a normal customer doing a development will only buy one or
two development boards and then will either design their own based on
the dev boards schematics, or even come to a company like us to
produce a derived design, the overall numbers are very low. If all
that we did here was development boards I doubt Enterpoint would be
operating today never mind heading for another record year. In numbers
our standard development boards are a tiny percentage of the boards we
design and manufacture now.

Aside from the narrow market a large percentage of dev boards are also
designed and manufactured by distributors and they usually want to add
as many of there other line products onto their boards thereby
facilitating sales of those products. Boards done by Xilinx and Altera
are usually a combination of features asked for by customers and
internal customers (FAE and Apps guys) so these are usually not
lightweight boards for that reason. We don't have these problems and
it allows us to be more flexible but even then we always have to
consider the market size on standard boards.

As always there is the odd exception to the rule so you might find
someone doing what you want if you look hard enough.

John Adair
Enterpoint Ltd.

On Jan 7, 11:44 pm, Allan Wang <alla...@gmail.com> wrote:

Is there no demand for an inexpensive dev board with DIMM sockets for
the purpose of having large memory? (say, two DIMMs for 4GB total).
Does the higher initial dev cost, and higher pin count FPGA really
justify these boards being at least $1500+?

The 780-pin count Cyclone is around $100 and seems to have enough IO
to interface with a DIMM and have plenty of pins left over.

On Jan 7, 6:16 pm, John Adair <g...@enterpoint.co.uk> wrote:

Allan

The problem with doing boards with DIMM sockets is the I/O count
needed is not far off 100 I/O. Cheaper end boards tend to have FPGAs
with 100-300 I/O. This leads to a board with limited other features so
there usually isn't a lot of logic in doing a dev board with these
restrictions for most manufacturers. As soon as you go into boards
based on FPGAs that have 300+ I/O they tend to based on the expensive
end of Spartan/Cyclone etc or worse still based on the performance
families like Virtex or Stratix.

I would ask why you want to use a DDR DIMM. You could get the same
performance with DDR2 or DDR3 running at faster rates but a narrower
interface and that is the concept behind many of our FPGA development
boards. If it's size then the DIMM does tend to win although we have
some single chip DDR3 designs coming that will give 256 Mbyte and
later on 512 Mbyte densities.

John Adair
Enterpoint Ltd. - Home of Raggedstone3. The Cyclone IV GX Development
Board.

On Jan 7, 5:09 am, Allan Wang <alla...@gmail.com> wrote:

I'm looking for a cheap Altera dev board with DDR RAM and an LVDS
compatible connector. However, it seems like the cheapest one is the
$1000 "Cyclone III FPGA Development Kit".

I initially thought that the $200 "Cyclone III FPGA Starter Kit" would
work since it has HSMC, but the manual states that it is only intended
for CMOS signals and has no provisions for differential pairs.

So does there exist a board that meets my requirements that is less
than $500? I know Xilinx does (the Digilent Atlys, which has great
specs), but I'd like to develop for the Cyclone 3/4 because they
support DDR DIMM's while the Spartans do not. If there doesn't exist
such a dev board, it seems to me like there's a huge gap in their line-
up.

What I want to do is make a daughtercard board for an 11-bit ADC, at
200MHz DDR. I need twelve LVDS pairs. Perhaps I could just try using
the starter kit board and see if the non-differential pair routing
will still work, but I don't want to just toss $200 away either.