I received an Altera Cyclone IV GX Transceiver Eval Kit, courtesy of Element14 for roadtest.
It came well packaged in a big 'Element-14' shipping box.
The product itself was also well packed :
And inside the box:
The box contained:
- A welcome letter
- Getting started guide
- Cyclone IV Eval board itself
- Network LAN Cable
- USB Cable
- Power Supply with UK, Euro and USA power leads
- Mounting hardware to add a PC Slot backplane
- A PC Slot backplane
The letter tells you where to get all the latest versions of the required development and eval tools.
I had to download more than 5GB of stuff - which took nearly 4 Hours - I'm sure it will be worth it though it would have been great if the latest versions had been included on a DVD, but they weren't.
The guide tells you how to setup the unit for it's first run, which consists of attching a network cable and the powersupply, then switch it on. The board will load the factory set Webserver application and disply it's IP address on the LCD screen - you can now browse to the device and follow links to the downloads and documentation.
So far so good.
I have not yet had a chance to play with the dev tools, but I intend to do so over the next couple of days.
I do know so far that as it comes out the box it has 2 transceivers on board - one is hardwired dierctly to the PCIe edge connector and the other is configured as attached to the Ethernet PHY chip. This tranceiver can be disconnected from the Ethernet chip and routed to the SMA connectors on the board - but doing so requires surgery with a soldering iron and handling extremely small surface resistors - less than 1mm in size. It also means you cannot use the SMA connectors and the Ethernet PHY at the same time, which is a shame.
There are some video tutorials on the website linked to from the documentation and I shall be following them to get an idea of the dev environment. I'll post back with more details.
Finally, for those that don't already know, this is an Eval board and not a Dev board - it's main purpose is so you can evaluate the high speed serial transceiver capabilities of the Cyclone IV. There is little possibility of using it to develop industrial control or other applications, since it has no IO Headers, and just a few user LEDs and Button inputs.
As well as the Cyclone IV FPGA this board also has a couple of CPLD onboard - one is dedicated to running the USB Blaster debug/JTAG interface, the other I believe is available for doing whatever you wish. (I think, will double check for sure!), and the Cyclone IV can also be programmed with the NIOS Processor package, so you can actually use the FPGA as a Micro.
Right, I'm off to try and cram 48 hours into one day. Back soon.
Kenny.
