miniSpartan6+ : A Powerful FPGA Board and Easy to Use IDE

Meet the miniSpartan6+ and the Scarab IDE:

When we came up with our board’s design, we looked at what was available in other boards on the market and enhanced it.

Our kit is small, much smaller than the closest thing on the market,it’s smaller than a credit card at only 1.8 in x 3.0 in. That means you can put it inside some pretty small projects. (Here’s something to get you thinking, by 2025 the cost of putting one pound into space is expected to be just $100.)

And our kit is bread board friendly, so you can quickly connect it to a shield or to a bread board.

Now, there’s a handful of other broads with many of these features on the market, but our miniSpartan6+ costs around half of what its closest competitor does.

The miniSpartan6+:

• The Spartan6 LX9 FPGA from Xilinx, one of the best FPGAs on the market.
• An on-board USB JTAG Programmer to power and program your FPGA with any open source programmer, like the one inside our own Scarab IDE.
• An on board USB interface that powers the board and allows communication with the PC at speeds up to 480Mbps. (That’s fast enough to make a logic analyzer. Check our website for updates on projects and tutorials).
• An on-board HDMI port. Instead of using VGA output on your projects, now you can go HDMI.
• An 8-channel analog to digital converter running at 1 MSPS with 8 bit resolution. So you can start connecting real world sensors to your FPGA kit.
• Memory: 32MB of SDRAM, 64Mbit of SPI Flash and a microSD card interface.
• A stereo audio output jack using 1-bit sigma-delta DAC to start playing your music.
• 24 Digital I/O pins.
• 8 LEDs.

The Scarab IDE:

We took existing IDEs in the embedded systems community and improved on them, coming up with the Scarab IDE, an easy to use GUI that allows you to develop, compile, and download programs to your FPGA (through the on board USB JTAG Programmer) with the click of a button. The Scarab IDE only requires the Xilinix ISE Design Tool to be instlalled on your machine.

It comes with our well documented Verilog/VHDL libraries and .bit files to easily program the FPGA for common tasks. Need the HDMI output? Maybe a logic analyzer? It’s all there.

Of course, your project might be more complicated to build, but you can start with a solid foundation that lets you focus on the heart of the software, not on how the FPGA can talk to your TV.

And you are not locked into our Scarab IDE. You can use the Xilinx ISE Design Tool to program your miniSpartan6+. Also Scarab IDE can be used to program any Xilinx Spartan 6 FPGA, no matter which kit it is a part of.

For more detail: miniSpartan6+ : A Powerful FPGA Board and Easy to Use IDE