Raggedstone3 expands the concept of the highly successful Raggedstone family of development boards from Enterpoint. The new Raggedstone3 extends the family with an increase in PCI performance to over 800 Mbytes/s a significant over previous products in the range. The 4 lane PCI Express interface is supported by a hard core PCIe function within the Altera™ Cyclone™ IV FPGA that is the heart of the board.
The Raggedstone3 will be offered in 2 primary FPGA configurations. The first of these uses a Cyclone™-IV EP4CGX110 FPGA. The second configuration uses a Cyclone™-IV EP4CGX150.
The Raggedstone3 comes as standard with 1 GBit of DDR2 DRAM memory and a range of options for Flash memory. A USB interface based on a FTDI™ FT232 is also features on this board. The product also contains EEprom, temperature sensor and high power regulator as supporting features making it a good target for NIOS™ embedded processor development.
In common with other Raggedstone family members the Raggedstone3 offers a large number user I/Os arranged as two independent DIL Header interfaces. Each of these simple interfaces is operates over a range of I/O voltage levels allowing a wide range of interface, or logic, specific modules to added to the base design. In total 120 I/O are available in these interfaces.
‘The Raggedstone3 is a very logic extension to our Raggedstone product concept. Keeping the key family concepts of PCI interface, high user I/O count, product lifecycle longevity and most significantly the best in price/performance ratio board in it’s respective marketplace where very important in the development of this product.’ says John Adair CEO of Enterpoint.
He also says ‘Raggedstone3’s simple 2.54mm pitch headers are a significant advantage to customers developing their own custom interface modules. Competing products often use fine pitch connectors forcing the PCB layer count up on add-on modules and hence the manufacturing costs of these add-on solutions. Our Headers deliver a large number of I/O in a sensible format allowing custom interface solutions to be implemented in 2 or 4 layer PCB designs. That’s a major cost advantage for customers using Raggestone3 as an OEM or COTs solution to achieve reduced project development costs and timescales.
Raggedstone3 is on show at ESC this week and will ship to customers in July 2011.
For further information, please contact boardsales@enterpoint.co.uk
