I've had on my desktop a little note that simply said "Arduino FPGA." Cryptic as the note sounds, it was an electronic sticky note reminding me to look up the specs of Arduino's new FPGA maker board, the MKR Vidor 4000.
The board features an Intel (used to be Altera) Cyclone 10 FPGA that it expects to be used for high-speed DSP operations for audio and video processing. Arduino will come out a visual editor that translates the design into Verilog, complies it on Arduino servers before downloading it all onto the FPGA. Sounds pretty easy. (Perhaps too easy?)
The FPGA contains 16K Logic Elements, 504Kbit of embedded RAM and 56 18x18 bit HW multipliers for high-speed DSP; Each pin can toggle at over 150 MHz and can be configured for functions such as UARTs, (Q)SPI, high res/ high freq PWM, quadrature encoder, I2C, I2S, Sigma Delta DAC, etc.
The MKR VIDOR 4000 features also a Microchip SAMD21, onboard 8 Mbyte SDRAM, 2 Mbyte QSPI Flash (1MB for user applications), Micro HDMI connector, MIPI camera connector, Wifi & BLE powered by U-BLOX NINA W10 Series, the classic MKR interface on which all pins are driven both by SAMD21 and FPGA and a MiniPCI Express connector with up to 25 user programmable pins.
Will this advance the adoption of FPGAs. I'm sure Arduino thinks so. What do you think?
