Felixstowe, Suffolk, UK – 2 October 2013 – Bugblat announces the TIF FPGA board.
The tiny TIF board is a complete FPGA development board and supercomponent. At its heart is an instant-on, non-volatile, high performance FPGA from Lattice Semiconductor’s MachXO2 range, a perfect target for experimenting with FPGA design, for developing design options, and for implementing custom hardware functionality.
The MachXO2 is a potent piece of silicon, with up to 4300 LUTs (depending of the TIF model), thirty four 512×18 RAM blocks that can be driven in parallel, a PLL that can do fractional synthesis, hard coded I2C, SPI, and Timer/Counter blocks, and 96Kbits of Flash alongside the configuration Flash.
The second chip on the TIF board is a CP2112 – a ROM coded 8051 from Silicon Labs. Yes, a preprogrammed 8051, just like when your dad was young. The CP2112 supplies regulated 3.3V power, a clock signal which is locked to the USB clock, and an I2C interface to rewrite the FPGA’s flash memory. Also a JTAG controller through which a user can recover a bricked FPGA. The I2C interface can read and write registers in the FPGA, so you can control the behavior of FPGA application logic.
Most importantly, the CP2112 implements a full USB HID device, so you can plug the TIF into a Windows, Linux, or Mac computer without special drivers being needed. HID, short for Human Interface Device, is supported out of the box by all modern operating systems.
The MachXO2 is supported by Lattice Diamond, the compile plus place and route software package that is a free download from Lattice Semiconductor. The output from Diamond is a JEDEC file. Downloading the JEDEC to the FPGA’s onboard Flash is the job of a Python program which is supplied with the TIF.
The TIF board comes with example FPGA designs that flash the onboard red and green LEDs. And one of the examples shows how to load a design into the FPGA, then control that design via a web page.
Quantity 1, the TIF board cost $24.99. More information at http://www.bugblat.com/products/tif
About Bugblat
Bugblat specializes in development system design, including logic analyzers and development boards for OEM customers and for direct sale. For more on Bugblat, please visit www.bugblat.com.
