Drigmorn1 - The Cheapest FPGA Development Board???

We have been promising this for a while and I am finally pleased to show first images and details of Drigmorn1 here

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We are aiming this to be the cheapest develoment board out there so if know any cheaper do let me know. We have some more testing to do before we let it out in the wild but hopefully that will be complete before Christmas to allow shipment before the holidays.

Use of this board is simplistic. A simple 5v jack for power and a RS232 interface to allow control by a PC using a terminal emulator etc. like Hyperterminal. Special variants do allow use as part of customer boards or prototypes and we should have some application notes coming on these more unusual uses of this board.

I am also interested in what features everyone would like as and when we do a Drigmorn2 bearing in mind it is a very cost sensative design.

It's a derivative of the new version Craignell family (obsolete and enhanced DIL/DIP component replacements) and pictures of those will be available soon too. We have done a lot of work to improve manufacturing yield on these and the Drigmorn1 and some of the work we have done here will allow the even smaller narrow version Craignells to made Q1/2008.

John Adair Enterpoint Ltd.

Reply to
John Adair
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Why use 40 MHz when most other Xilinx FPGA boards are fitted with 50 MHz.? (would ease code portability)

  • Maybe you could leave some TSSOP54 or similar pad for soldering on a SDRAM chip..?
  • What are the three larger chips for? (one is M25P40 I assume)

A further simplification would be to rid of the rs232, leds, and the dc power jack. Dc power can be had from the dil-40 pins.

Reply to
posedge52

I would guess that the through-hole parts are a not-insignificant part of the assembly cost - I would think most users wouldn't have a problem soldering these, and supplying the board without then would also allow flexibility e.g. to fit straight headers to plug into a prototyping board.

Reply to
Mike Harrison

I would keep the RS232 or at least the line driver since RS232 is still one of the simplest method to connect the board to a PC. If you don't have a serial port than you can buy a low-cost (I paid £5 for mine) RS232-USB cable.

Hans

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PS Looks like a very nice board!

Reply to
HT-Lab

Another suggestion - put a footprint for a 6-pin o.1" header for a FTDI TTL-232 cable - this is a nice quick way to get high-speed serial comms and 5V power.

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Reply to
Mike Harrison

The M25P40 is the standard serial flash memory fitted. So there is some capacity to run a Microblaze etc.. I'll have to check the footprints but I think we can go to 16Mbit and possibly 32/64 Mbit as options.

Power can be put in the pin header as an option and variants of the board with straight pins are an option we are considering offering.

If you don't want the RS232, pins etc, then maybe the Craignell series are better for your application. They are smaller take the shape of a standard DIL/DIP (28,32,36,40 pins available) and very minimalist. Otherwise they are identical to the Drigmorn1.

Leaving a site for something else is a possibility the future. We may also do a companion board to do some more.

John Adair Enterpoint Ltd.

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Reply to
John Adair

Mike

As with any of our products if there is a demand we will offer the variant. We can build variants as part of a main build at relatively little cost. For specific customer needs we already do variants of chips in say industrial grade, or special pinning like our OVERCOAT option for board stacking and so on. Unlike many of competitors who offer a very fixed product, unless you want 10K+ units, we do special builds down at volumes as low as a few units. As always if someone wants something different it's always worth talking to one of my team in the office.

John Adair Enterpo> > >We have been promising this for a while and I am finally pleased to

assembly cost - I

the board without then

prototyping board.- Hide quoted text -

Reply to
John Adair

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I'd buy 2 or 3 if it had twice the number of pins. So instead of a

1x20 header strip on each side there would be a 2x20 header strip per side.

-Dave Pollum

Reply to
Dave Pollum

Dave

It's possible to do as the chip has enough I/O but it would need microvias and extra layers in the pcb to achieve that and that all comes at a cost. However we will see how many we ship and if the numbers are large enough then doing these sorts of things may be possible and keeping the low cost aspect.

In the future we will be having some bigger "on the bench" boards that compete against boards like the Spartan-3 Starter Kit but that's not for a while. We have some more interesting "concept boards" yet to release before that happens.

John Adair Enterpo> >

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Reply to
John Adair

Hello John,

Does Enterpoint have something like this:

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?

THX, B.

Reply to
Bogdan Paraschiv

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