Be careful, it can be addictive! This FPGA development board is truly comprehensive!

Article Overview

The Alchitry Au FPGA is an FPGA development board designed for learning, project prototyping, and high-performance logic development . It features the Xilinx Artix- 7 XC7A35T- 1C chip, providing over 33,000 logic units (LUTs) and 256MB of DDR3 RAM, offering exceptional processing power and flexibility compared to similar products.

This article will give you a comprehensive understanding of the hardware configuration, peripheral resources, on-chip ADC structure, and actual testing experience of this development board .

Core hardware specifications

Alchitry Au is equipped with abundant I/O and the necessary basic circuitry , allowing developers to get started quickly :

Key features

• FPGA chip : Xilinx Artix-7 XC7A35T-1C
• Supports multiple speed levels, temperature specifications, and operating voltage options.

• DDR3 memory : 256MB, suitable for complex data buffering and high-speed processing.
  
• I/O resources
• A total of 102 GPIO pins (default 3.3V logic)
• Twenty of them can be switched to a 1.8V logic level.
• 9 differential analog input channels
  

• Onboard peripherals
• 8× Programmable General Purpose LEDs
• Reset button, Done status indicator
• 100MHz onboard clock (flexibly configurable by the FPGA's internal logic )
• USB -C interface (configuration + power supply)
• USB to serial port interface (for data communication)
  

• HDL Support : All Alchitry series support Lucid Hardware Description Language (HDL).

These resources make Alchitry Au suitable for both introductory teaching and intermediate to advanced FPGA engineering development.

Scalable hardware ecosystem: Elements expansion board

Alchitry Au supports a stacked expansion board system called Elements , which is designed similarly to the Arduino Shield or Raspberry Pi HAT.

With the expansion board you can:

• Add more buttons, LEDs, and GPIO .

• Expanding the prototype development area

• Add additional peripheral modules

• Quickly build circuit prototypes

A robust and open ecosystem significantly enhances the playability of the development board .

The code used in the demonstration can be found below.

Alchitry Au Field Programmable Gate Array ( FPGA ) Demonstration

In actual testing of the serial terminal, the characters sent by the host are echoed back to the user in real time. The test interface displays the device as Alchitry Au with a baud rate of 1000000, and the terminal provides immediate feedback after characters are entered.

Built-in 12-bit 1MSPS ADC analysis

The Alchitry Au 's Artix-7 FPGA incorporates a powerful set of analog-to -digital converters ( ADCs ).

FPGA on-chip ADC specifications

• Resolution: 12 -bit
• Sampling rate: 1 MSPS (1 million samples per second)
• Input channel:
• 8-channel multiplexed differential channel ( multiplexed with digital I/O )
• 1 independent differential channel
• The on-chip structure includes:
• Temperature sensor
• Multiple power monitoring channels (such as VCCPINT , VCCBRAM , etc.)
• 1.25V internal reference power supply
• Two independent ADC modules
• Configurable Register Interface
• JTAG debugging support

This enables Alchitry Au to easily handle applications such as sensor data acquisition, voltage monitoring, and analog signal reading.

Sufficient storage resources

In addition to the on-chip Block RAM ( BRAM ) built into the FPGA , Alchitry Au also integrates:

• 256MB DDR 3 SDRAM

• On-chip memory controller

This allows developers to handle large amounts of data, such as video caching, image processing, and machine learning inference caching, thereby expanding the breadth of application scenarios.

Alchitry Au FPGA is an FPGA development platform that achieves an excellent balance between size, performance, and scalability .

Whether you're an FPGA beginner, a university lab instructor, or an engineer building project prototypes, this development board based on the Xilinx Artix-7 provides ample computing power, flexible I/O pins, and a complete software ecosystem . If you're interested in this FPGA chip, the Xilinx Artix-7 XC7A35T-1C is readily available for purchase on DigiKey.

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