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  • Author Author: rscasny
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Who is Interested in Experimenting with a Spartan-6 FPGA? If You Are, I have 2 Boards to Giveaway for Projects

rscasny

I had a lot of interest in my giveaway for the Digilent CMOD S7 board, so I am offering another giveaway for 2 members who are interested in experimenting with a Spartan-6 FPGA. Let me tell you about the board first. image

 

It's called the Cmod S6 -- a Breadboardable Spartan-6 FPGA Module.

 

It's small, featuring a 48-pin DIP form factor board built around a Xilinx Spartan 6 LX4 FPGA.

 

The board also includes a programming ROM, clock source, USB programming and data transfer circuit, power supplies, and basic I/O devices. There are 46 FPGA I/O signals that are routed to 100-mil-spaced through-hole pins, making the Cmod S6 well suited for use with solderless breadboards. At just .7” by 2.6” inches, it can also be loaded in a standard socket and used in embedded systems.

 

Key features include:

 

Spartan 6 XC6SLX4-2CPG196 FPGA Features include:

  • 600 slices (each with 4 LUTs and eight flip-flops);
  • 8 DSP slices;
  • 216Kbits of block RAM;
  • 2 CMTs (4 DCMs and 2 PLLs).

 

Board features include:

 

16Mbyte Spansion Quad SPI Flash for storing FPGA configurations and/or user data;

  • 46 FPGA GPIO signals brought to DIP pins;
  • Two on-board clock sources;
  • 4 user LEDs and 2 user buttons;
  • On-board Adept USB2 port for configuration, test and communications interfaces.

 

Here's the datasheet:

 

https://www.farnell.com/datasheets/1841742.pdf?_ga=2.84073758.603595138.1565037142-1061579168.1558457094

 

 

What Do You Need to Do To Get These Boards?

 

I'm running these as board project giveaways instead of RoadTests to give members interested in experimenting with the Spartan-6 but may not feel they have the background to compete in a full roadtest. So like the last giveaway if you are would-be roadtester who would like to build up his/her portfolio of things you have done on the community or you want to do something to learn about the Spartan-6 FPGA and get some time to improve your skills with the associated design tool, this could very well be for you. (A side note: I may very well decide to roadtest this in the future. But for now, I want to do a giveaway project.)

 

So, tell me what you want to achieve with this little board? What's your goal in learning? What would you like to experiment with? Or what kind of project do you think you would build. I'll choose the 2 most interesting ideas and send you the board.

 

Randall Scasny

RaodTest Program Manager

  • Dear Sir,

     

    I am happy to introduce you about myself that, I am Asst. Professor working in IIIT AP Academic institute, India, I am having basic knowledge on FPGA and programing with Xilinx Vivado design Suite using Zedboard, Nexys 3, Basys 3 trainer kits, I gained knowledge on attending hands-on sessions organized by various institutions. It was interesting to work on the FPGA to design the required logic's then which are available in Microcontrollers kits. My participation certificates were attached below for your reference which shows my interest from the past years. I would like to take this opportunity to design the projects on home automation, agriculture, industrial process monitoring, medical devices, etc.

     

    imageimageimageimage

     

    Before going deep into the projects I would like to test my knowledge on interfacing various types of components like LEDs, LCD, Switches, Hex keypad, diodes, transistors, capacitors, batteries, buttons, SD card, etc Sensors like Temperature, Hall, Humidity, Accelerometer, Gyro, Light, Magnetometer, IR, Photodiode, pressure, flow, weight, etc and Actuators DC motor, Servo Motor, Stepper motor, Relay, etc via I2C, SPI, WiFi, BT connectivity and process the data in ADC, DAC, GPIOs as PWM, Counters,etc. This will help to study the environmental conditions, vibrations, noise, motion, signal conditioning,  video & image capturing, etc.

     

    what you want to achieve with this little board?

    CMOD S6 tiny board has 46 GPIO pins, 2 on-board clocks, 4 user LEDs and 2 user buttons so these are enough to design a basic 'n' number of projects which can be useful in small and essential applications. I would like to design Digital counter circuit, play with LED strobe lights, data read from Analog sensor, store data in Memory.

     

    What's your goal in learning?

    My aim was to understand the programming to FPGA and design the step-by-step interfacing steps to read and write sensor data on memory or display, control the speed of motors, interfacing the keypad to process, etc. The project demonstration will be shared to students in e-learning classes in our institution to improve their skills and help them to design innovative projects and involve them to post blogs and motivate them to get experience my participating in design contests. The blog post can also help the global community members to learn new skills. Like wise I would like to share the knowledge by receiving the CMOD S6 Spartan-6 FPGA Module.

     

    What would you like to experiment with?
    In the Microcontroller the register sizes are fixed and the process of execution takes serially and it take much wait time. And the tasks are executed one after the other so it take long time to process and are not suitable for real-time complex process in industries. FPGA can perform the task individually and many at a time as we can design the logic circuits according to our wish. Once the interfacing and signalling are learned with the basic designs then, I would like to test the performance of the DSP for the analog signal for audio/video which can be used for communication and data transfer. Apart from the data transmission, signal conditioning is used by designing filter to remove noise. FPGA are mostly used in radar for signal transmission and receiving time triggers, data processing, etc. CMOD S6 Spartan-6 FPGA Module is a tiny device so it has a possibility to design a wearable/handheld devices. It will be a good exposure to experiment with this tiny module and test the performance so that it can be extended with high configuration FGPA for future prospectus.

     

    Through this giveaway I would like to take the opportunity to improve my programming skills on FPGA and learn the interfacing of various components, sensor and actuators. The interfacing can be exposed to students to improve their skills in FPGAs by teaching VHDL, Verilog, such kind of interactive classes help to students to create innovative designs in day to day life applications in various fields. Once they are learning programming to FPGA they can choose the modules for their final year projects.

     

    My project title will be Industrial environment status monitoring with the temperature, humidity, pressure sensors.

  • in reply to zamaliphe

    Considering Spartan 7 uses Vivado and Spartan 6 requires the older ISE Design Suite 14.7, I'd recommend you stick to the 7 series. They're both capable IDEs but different and both huge multi-GB downloads.

  • I have allredy get a board last week not sure if can apply here but I just saw this post image

  • Hello,

    Recently I am very intrigued by the field of FPGA. Recently I made a project with Arduino Vidor as FPGA but I couldn't hard code it the FPGA way because of lack of Intel Quartus beginner guides.

    The Spartan 6 FPGA has a lot of beginner guides and a lot of documentation. The board will help me get into the actual FPGA. With the board after experimenting and learning, I would like to apply what I learned in building a device related to the railway safety system.

    Thanking you,