News and New Products

Avnet releases Xilinx Spartan-6 FPGA evaluation and development kits

The kits support the new FMC (FPGA Mezzanine Card) expansion standard.

Rick Nelson, Editor-in-Chief -- EDN, 9/29/2009

The Avnet Electronics Marketing operating group of Avnet Inc has announced the release of the Xilinx Spartan-6 LX16 FPGA evaluation kit and Spartan-6 LX150T FPGA development kit. Both kits support the new FMC (FPGA Mezzanine Card) expansion standard, which enables the addition of add-on modules and customization when working with FPGA applications.

The Spartan-6 LX16 FPGA evaluation kit is based on the Spartan-6 LX16 FPGA and showcases a system-level approach to low-power design for the Spartan-6 family. Designed for use as a general-purpose FPGA development board, its low-power design also makes the kit suitable for portable instrumentation and battery-powered applications. Jim Beneke, VP of global technical marketing at Avnet, said that, to emphasize low-power applications, the kit is powered through an included lithium ion battery. It can also be powered via a USB cable connection or a 12V adaptor, and is supported by six high-efficiency portable power management ICs from Texas Instruments. A new PSoC 3 programmable system-on-chip from Cypress adds 20-bit precision analog, system power management, USB/UART/SPI connectivity, LCD direct drive, CapSense touch sensing, and FPGA configuration support. The board provides a low-pin-count FMC expansion connector for adding FMC daughter cards and sells for $225. This kit will ship by year-end. Raj Seelam, senior marketing manager for platform solutions at Xilinx, said Xilinx will offer a version starting at $295 that emphasizes flexibility rather than power.

The new Spartan-6 LX150T FPGA development kit is built for video, industrial networking and control, wireless communications, PCIe expansion, and general FPGA prototyping applications. Based on the Spartan-6 LX150T FPGA with its on-chip 2.5-Gbps transceivers, the kit provides a platform for developing low-cost applications that require high-speed connectivity. The board features high-performance DDR3 memory, a 10/100/1G Ethernet interface, and two low-pin-count FMC expansion connectors; it sells for $995.

Avnet’s Spartan-6 LX16 FPGA and Spartan-6 LX150T FPGA kits complement existing development kits from Xilinx that make up the Base Platform of Xilinx’s new Targeted Design Platform strategy. This strategy includes base, domain, and market-specific targeted design platforms. The two new kits from Avnet join the base platform to provide designers a standard development platform and software package for basic evaluation and development of general FPGA designs. In the future, both companies will offer domain-specific targeted technology that adds software and reference designs specific to embedded processing, DSP, and connectivity. In addition, both companies will offer market-specific targeted technology that will enable the addition of hardware features via add-on modules, domain software, and reference designs, or IP to target market-specific applications.

The Spartan-6 LX16 FPGA evaluation kit and Spartan-6 LX150T FPGA development kit will be featured during X-fest 2009, Avnet and Xilinx’s 37-city global technical seminar series. X-fest offers practical, how-to training for FPGA, DSP and embedded systems designers in locations throughout Asia, Europe, Japan, and North America from October 6, 2009 through February 2010.