I'm a final yr student undertaking a project which requires a microcontroller with an operating clk freq at 60MHz.
My university has altera DE2 boards available, which to my understanding has oscillators @ 50MHz.
A suggestion was to overclock the fpga, however I don't know where to start looking. Would someone be able to point me in the right directions to obtaining such information ?
You need to look into the data sheet of the FPGA you are using. Inside the FPGA you can increase the clock frequency from the external oscillator. So your logic can use a much faster clock signal than the external applied 50MHz.
The data sheet will give you details about how to do that.
Cheers,
Guenter
Best place to start would be
That board has a Cyclone-II on it. That Cyclone-II has 4 PLL's in it.
These PLL's can be used to make (just about) any frequency you need.
And as always, Google is your friend. Do try the search feature some time!
Besides doing what others have suggested with the FPGA's internal PLLs (for Altera) or DCMs (for Xilinx), you could also replace the 50MHz oscillator with a 60MHz one.
Assuming that you've already mastered soldering, however, you'll learn much more if you figure out how to use the FPGA's internal resources to solve the problem. When you start designing stuff for a commercial (or other) venture, these types of "soft" solutions are invaluable to know about since they can usually save hardware cost and can also be used to implement field-upgradeable bug fixes -- I mean feature enhancements. ;-)
Bob
I also have that board. In the board lower right hand corner. There is a ext. clock input. What you need to do is
or you need to know how to configure PLL to get the clk you need.
Thank you for everyone's input your help was much appreciated. :)
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