Development platform combines Microchips FPGAs on single board
The HES-MPF500-M2S150 development kit is the first to carry devices from Microchip’s PolarFire and SmartFusion2 FPGA families, says Aldec. Other development boards carry one or the other. Whereas single-FPGA boards carry just mid-range devices, this development kit supports the early co-development and co-verification of hardware and software in projects targeting Microchip’s PolarFire and SmartFusion2 FPGA families.
Zibi Zalewski, general manager of Aldec’s hardware division, said: “By selecting Microchip’s largest devices from both families, we are sparing engineers from worrying about optimization early on in their design flow. Instead, they can do their what-if experimentation and address optimisation and other performance issues once they have achieved the top-level functionality they desire.”
Although a design might only be targeted at the PolarFire FPGA, the SmartFusion2 device can be used as an embedded host and test driver. Similarly, the PolarFire FPGA can be loaded with test vectors for verifying the design on a SmartFusion2 device.
The HES-MPF500-M2S150 development kit features Microchip’s low power PolarFire MPF500T FCG1152 FPGA, which has 481k logic elements, 1480 math blocks, 33Mbits of RAM, and 584 I/Os. In addition, the PolarFire family of FPGAs afford high security, says Aldec, to protect against cyber-crime.
The HES-MPF500-M2S150 also features Microchip’s SmartFusion2 M2S150 FPGA, which is based on an embedded Arm Cortex-M3 microcontroller subsystem with DDR3 memory controllers.
The two FPGAs are connected via direct I/Os and both devices have access, via a PCIe switch, to a PCIe x4 Gen2 edge connector- it is this switch on the development board that allows the FPGAs to work together or independently.
High speed serial I/Os are available on both sides of the kit (i.e. for the PolarFire and SmartFusion2) via QSFP+ ports. The SmartFusion2 can communicate with the outside world via Ethernet or USB. Connection to peripherals is achieved through an FMC HPC connector with 134 I/Os and eight high speed serial I/Os.
Aldec’s FMC cards includes ones tailored for the development of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), IoT, networks and high performance computing (HPC) applications.
The HES-MPF500-M2S150 development kit is available to order now and includes designer resources, sample designs, utilities and documentation.
