Spartan-6 Boards

[John Adair]

It been over a year since we produced our first Spartan-6 board and we
now have 3 main products, Raggedstone2, Drigmorn3 and Drigmorn4 based
on Spartan-6 and now ramping up into serious volumes. Spartan-6 has
become available in large numbers in lot's of variants and we are
start to make other die size variants of these products available.

Not to forget our customer base in the Virtex markets our Broaddown3
and Broaddown5 products are finally heading towards being available
now that silicon availability in Virtex-6 is improving also. We have
some plans for new products this area as well and mor n that later.

The question what I would like to ask group is what you would like to
see us do next in the Spartan-6 arena?

John Adair
Enterpoint Ltd.

 

[Bill Garber]

"John Adair" <g1@enterpoint.co.uk> wrote in message news:b692dabf-22ec-4d19-aa33-79f43e6298ea@v23g2000vbi.googlegroups.com...

It been over a year since we produced our first Spartan-6 board and we
now have 3 main products, Raggedstone2, Drigmorn3 and Drigmorn4 based
on Spartan-6 and now ramping up into serious volumes. Spartan-6 has
become available in large numbers in lot's of variants and we are
start to make other die size variants of these products available.

Not to forget our customer base in the Virtex markets our Broaddown3
and Broaddown5 products are finally heading towards being available
now that silicon availability in Virtex-6 is improving also. We have
some plans for new products this area as well and mor n that later.

The question what I would like to ask group is what you would like to
see us do next in the Spartan-6 arena?

John Adair
Enterpoint Ltd.

Is this y'all, here? I only had the above to go on. 8^)

http://www.enterpoint.co.uk/

Bill

 

[john.orlando@gmail.com]

On Oct 10, 8:25 am, John Adair <g...@enterpoint.co.uk> wrote:

It been over a year since we produced our first Spartan-6 board and we
now have 3 main products, Raggedstone2, Drigmorn3 and Drigmorn4 based
on Spartan-6 and now ramping up into serious volumes. Spartan-6 has
become available in large numbers in lot's of variants and we are
start to make other die size variants of these products available.

Not to forget our customer base in the Virtex markets our Broaddown3
and Broaddown5 products are finally heading towards being available
now that silicon availability in Virtex-6 is improving also. We have
some plans for new products this area as well and mor n that later.

The question what I would like to ask group is what you would like to
see us do next in the Spartan-6 arena?

I know you've expressed some concerns in the past over integrating FMC
connectors on to your boards, but I'd personally put a vote in for
this, especially on something like your Raggedstone2 and Broaddown
boards. There is a hole in the FPGA board market right now, where it
is hard to find a reasonably priced FPGA board with a PCIe interface +
an FMC interface that would easily fit into a PC (i.e., doesn't come
off the top of the PCB as it does on the SP605, ML605, and most of the
other FMC-based FPGA boards available today).

(warning: minor advertising ahead, but just for the purpose of
clarifying my interests). Our company, Epiq Solutions, has finally
moved our Bitshark FMC-1RX software-defined radio FMC card into
production, and we've had several inquiries from folks looking for a
PCIe host board solution that will easily fit into a PC (and that
doesn't cost an arm and a leg). So the i/o portion of the FMC board
would be positioned where the i/o side is typically oriented on a PCIe
board. In our case, this would provide access to the RF inputs from
outside of the host PC when the PC case is closed up. To clarify, a
picture of our board can be found here (website is still in the
process of being updated, but you get the idea):

http://www.epiq-solutions.com/product_detail.php?line=Bitshark&product=Bitshark%20FMC

So, my vote is for including FMC, at least the low-pin count variant.
The connectors aren't that pricey any more, and both Samtec and Molex
(I think) have them available.

Regards,
John
www.epiq-solutions.com

 

[Brian Drummond]

On Mon, 11 Oct 2010 02:30:44 -0700 (PDT), John Adair <g1@enterpoint.co.uk>
wrote:

To some extent we can already do this with our Ethernet add-on
modules. There is a plan for a Gigabit add-on module as well but no
timescale on that as yet.

In the higher performance area our Broaddown3 and Broaddown5 that are
just going into production have Gigabit capability built in.

These don't appear to be on the website ... is there any information about them

yet?

- Brian

 

[Socrates]

On Oct 11, 5:28 am, "john.orla...@gmail.com" <john.orla...@gmail.com>
wrote:

On Oct 10, 8:25 am, John Adair <g...@enterpoint.co.uk> wrote:

It been over a year since we produced our first Spartan-6 board and we
now have 3 main products, Raggedstone2, Drigmorn3 and Drigmorn4 based
on Spartan-6 and now ramping up into serious volumes. Spartan-6 has
become available in large numbers in lot's of variants and we are
start to make other die size variants of these products available.

Not to forget our customer base in the Virtex markets our Broaddown3
and Broaddown5 products are finally heading towards being available
now that silicon availability in Virtex-6 is improving also. We have
some plans for new products this area as well and mor n that later.

The question what I would like to ask group is what you would like to
see us do next in the Spartan-6 arena?

I know you've expressed some concerns in the past over integrating FMC
connectors on to your boards, but I'd personally put a vote in for
this, especially on something like your Raggedstone2 and Broaddown
boards.  There is a hole in the FPGA board market right now, where it
is hard to find a reasonably priced FPGA board with a PCIe interface +
an FMC interface that would easily fit into a PC (i.e., doesn't come
off the top of the PCB as it does on the SP605, ML605, and most of the
other FMC-based FPGA boards available today).

(warning: minor advertising ahead, but just for the purpose of
clarifying my interests).  Our company, Epiq Solutions, has finally
moved our Bitshark FMC-1RX software-defined radio FMC card into
production, and we've had several inquiries from folks looking for a
PCIe host board solution that will easily fit into a PC (and that
doesn't cost an arm and a leg). So the i/o portion of the FMC board
would be positioned where the i/o side is typically oriented on a PCIe
board. In our case, this would provide access to the RF inputs from
outside of the host PC when the PC case is closed up.  To clarify, a
picture of our board can be found here (website is still in the
process of being updated, but you get the idea):

http://www.epiq-solutions.com/product_detail.php?line=Bitshark&produc....

So, my vote is for including FMC, at least the low-pin count variant.
The connectors aren't that pricey any more, and both Samtec and Molex
(I think) have them available.

Regards,
Johnwww.epiq-solutions.com

I definitely vote for PCI-e plus ethernet. If the FPGA have
transceivers for PCI-e - its a sin not to use it! I like having many
places to connect additional wires/boards, but this is for ADC/DAC/VGA/
etc addition - most of the basic things have to be on the board.

Kind regards,
Tomas D.

 

[John Adair]

John

One of the things that we do with the Raggedstone family are customer
derivative products. We actual do a lot of customer specific derivates
of these boards that the general engineering community don't get to
see. The DIL Headers are not just an easy low tech connection standard
but a source of FPGA I/O if we need them for something else. The
relatively clear areas of PCB under the headers are also not a
coincidence. Have a look at the difference between the central area
and under the DIL Headers of RS1 and RS2. RS3 will offer the same as
well.

If you have enough serious customers, and that doesn't need to be very
many, we can cut and make a derivative of RS2 in a few weeks if I can
make enough space in our extremely loaded assembly line. Our record
for doing something more complicated that this is 18 days to handing
working boards to a customer so it's very viable if we have the
silicon as we already have with RS2.

The RS2 LHS DIL Header has 68 I/O in it which is just about enough for
a proper implementation of a LPC FMC so it sould be easy to do a
derivative where we remove the LHS DIL Header and replace with a LPC
FMC. There are also 3 high speed connections currently linked to SATA
connectors that can also be easily canibalised and even on the right
side of the Spartan-6 for routing.

Cost wise there wouldn't be a hugh increase on unit cost as most parts
share with the main RS2. Might be a little to cover tooling and setup
etc. but that just depends on numbers. Our line can typically make
batches from 1-1000 units so no problem doing a low volume run
ecconomically.

If this is of interest to you, or anyone else, it's worth emailing me
directly. Use our general "boardsales" email and it will get to me.

John Adair
Enterpoint Ltd.

On 11 Oct, 03:28, "john.orla...@gmail.com" <john.orla...@gmail.com>
wrote:

On Oct 10, 8:25 am, John Adair <g...@enterpoint.co.uk> wrote:

It been over a year since we produced our first Spartan-6 board and we
now have 3 main products, Raggedstone2, Drigmorn3 and Drigmorn4 based
on Spartan-6 and now ramping up into serious volumes. Spartan-6 has
become available in large numbers in lot's of variants and we are
start to make other die size variants of these products available.

Not to forget our customer base in the Virtex markets our Broaddown3
and Broaddown5 products are finally heading towards being available
now that silicon availability in Virtex-6 is improving also. We have
some plans for new products this area as well and mor n that later.

The question what I would like to ask group is what you would like to
see us do next in the Spartan-6 arena?

I know you've expressed some concerns in the past over integrating FMC
connectors on to your boards, but I'd personally put a vote in for
this, especially on something like your Raggedstone2 and Broaddown
boards.  There is a hole in the FPGA board market right now, where it
is hard to find a reasonably priced FPGA board with a PCIe interface +
an FMC interface that would easily fit into a PC (i.e., doesn't come
off the top of the PCB as it does on the SP605, ML605, and most of the
other FMC-based FPGA boards available today).

(warning: minor advertising ahead, but just for the purpose of
clarifying my interests).  Our company, Epiq Solutions, has finally
moved our Bitshark FMC-1RX software-defined radio FMC card into
production, and we've had several inquiries from folks looking for a
PCIe host board solution that will easily fit into a PC (and that
doesn't cost an arm and a leg). So the i/o portion of the FMC board
would be positioned where the i/o side is typically oriented on a PCIe
board. In our case, this would provide access to the RF inputs from
outside of the host PC when the PC case is closed up.  To clarify, a
picture of our board can be found here (website is still in the
process of being updated, but you get the idea):

http://www.epiq-solutions.com/product_detail.php?line=Bitshark&produc....

So, my vote is for including FMC, at least the low-pin count variant.
The connectors aren't that pricey any more, and both Samtec and Molex
(I think) have them available.

Regards,
Johnwww.epiq-solutions.com

 

[John Adair]

To some extent we can already do this with our Ethernet add-on
modules. There is a plan for a Gigabit add-on module as well but no
timescale on that as yet.

In the higher performance area our Broaddown3 and Broaddown5 that are
just going into production have Gigabit capability built in.

John Adair
Enterpoint Ltd.

On 11 Oct, 10:09, Socrates <mail...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Oct 11, 5:28 am, "john.orla...@gmail.com" <john.orla...@gmail.com
wrote:



On Oct 10, 8:25 am, John Adair <g...@enterpoint.co.uk> wrote:

It been over a year since we produced our first Spartan-6 board and we
now have 3 main products, Raggedstone2, Drigmorn3 and Drigmorn4 based
on Spartan-6 and now ramping up into serious volumes. Spartan-6 has
become available in large numbers in lot's of variants and we are
start to make other die size variants of these products available.

Not to forget our customer base in the Virtex markets our Broaddown3
and Broaddown5 products are finally heading towards being available
now that silicon availability in Virtex-6 is improving also. We have
some plans for new products this area as well and mor n that later.

The question what I would like to ask group is what you would like to
see us do next in the Spartan-6 arena?

I know you've expressed some concerns in the past over integrating FMC
connectors on to your boards, but I'd personally put a vote in for
this, especially on something like your Raggedstone2 and Broaddown
boards.  There is a hole in the FPGA board market right now, where it
is hard to find a reasonably priced FPGA board with a PCIe interface +
an FMC interface that would easily fit into a PC (i.e., doesn't come
off the top of the PCB as it does on the SP605, ML605, and most of the
other FMC-based FPGA boards available today).

(warning: minor advertising ahead, but just for the purpose of
clarifying my interests).  Our company, Epiq Solutions, has finally
moved our Bitshark FMC-1RX software-defined radio FMC card into
production, and we've had several inquiries from folks looking for a
PCIe host board solution that will easily fit into a PC (and that
doesn't cost an arm and a leg). So the i/o portion of the FMC board
would be positioned where the i/o side is typically oriented on a PCIe
board. In our case, this would provide access to the RF inputs from
outside of the host PC when the PC case is closed up.  To clarify, a
picture of our board can be found here (website is still in the
process of being updated, but you get the idea):

http://www.epiq-solutions.com/product_detail.php?line=Bitshark&produc....

So, my vote is for including FMC, at least the low-pin count variant.
The connectors aren't that pricey any more, and both Samtec and Molex
(I think) have them available.

Regards,
Johnwww.epiq-solutions.com

I definitely vote for PCI-e plus ethernet. If the FPGA have
transceivers for PCI-e - its a sin not to use it! I like having many
places to connect additional wires/boards, but this is for ADC/DAC/VGA/
etc addition - most of the basic things have to be on the board.

Kind regards,
Tomas D.

 

[John Adair]

Brian

This might appear twice as I had a posting error.

The Broaddown3 and Broaddown5 don't have much documentation on the
website as yet but here are the outline details:

Broaddown3 - PCIe (X4/X8) with XC6SLX75T as interface and controller +
2 x 2 array of Virtex-6 FPGAs in the FFG784 package. There is also
DDR3 memory available to the array and 2 Gigabit Ethernet also from
the controller FPGA. This product is aimed at HPC markets.

Broaddown5 - As Broaddown3 except FPGA array is replaced with a
monster XC6VLX760. This has a big I/O count around it and is aimed at
ASIC prototyping.

There are some of these details in one of the newsletters. The website
should get some proper pages for these products before too long.

John Adair
Enterpoint Ltd.

On 11 Oct, 11:04, Brian Drummond <brian_drumm...@btconnect.com> wrote:

On Mon, 11 Oct 2010 02:30:44 -0700 (PDT), John Adair <g...@enterpoint.co.uk
wrote:

To some extent we can already do this with our Ethernet add-on
modules. There is a plan for a Gigabit add-on module as well but no
timescale on that as yet.

In the higher performance area our Broaddown3 and Broaddown5 that are
just going into production have Gigabit capability built in.

These don't appear to be on the website ... is there any information about them
yet?

- Brian