The Dragon PCI FPGA board

August 2011 - Linux port available here.

Characteristics

Dragon is an FPGA development board that plugs into a PCI and/or USB port.

• Xilinx's FPGA Spartan-II XC2S100, plus FPGA boot-PROM
• PCI bus (32 bits/32MHz) with target mode reference design
• USB interface (about 1MBytes/s max sustained)
• Ethernet with 10BASE-T reference design
• I2C master controller, plus onboard I2C EEPROM

Other features:

• Text LCD native connector
• JTAG interface
• Top and bottom SIL connectors (can plug into a wide 'solderless-breadboard' for experiments) and dual-row connectors (can be used as motherboard for other projects)
• Optional socketed oscillator.
• 8051 microcontroller (on the back of the board). Use of the 8051 is optional. When in use, the 8051 and FPGA can communicate through an 8-bits synchronous bidirectional bus.
• Plug'n play, easy to control from the PC (through the USB)
  • download/communicate with the FPGA
  • program the FPGA boot-PROM
  • download the 8051
  • control the I2C
• FlashyD compatible

How it looks

On the bottom, there are the USB-8051 (square IC), the EEPROM and FPGA boot-PROM (2 top rectangles) and voltage regulator.

What can you do with your Dragon?

Any well-trained Dragon can throw flames and smoke. That's easy; just plug the USB to the main power (110 to 240V, depending on where you are). While that will void the warranty, you should get some smoke... and maybe some flames.

Joke apart, the main Dragon attractions are the PCI, USB, Ethernet, plus the LCD connections.

PCI interface

Dragon is a PCI board, see fpga4fun's PCI project that was developed with Dragon.
The FPGA is directly connected to the PCI bus, no complicated interface (PLX...). A target mode reference design is provided.

Here's a text LCD controlled through PCI.

USB interface

• FPGA configuration (takes about 1 second)
• PC communication with the FPGA (at about 1MBytes/s=8Mbits/s)
• FPGA boot-PROM programming (takes about 10 seconds)

USB can be used in standalone mode if you want (you don't have to plug Dragon into a PCI slot, it can be used in USB mode alone, i.e. on your desk).

Also note that both PCI and USB can be used simultaneously (two PCs can be connected to Dragon at the same time). That allows interesting applications, like the PCI logic analyzer where Dragon is plugged in one PC and another PC can spy on the PCI transactions through USB.

Flashy

Dragon can be used as motherboard for other projects. See here for example Dragon with a FlashyD acquisition board.

Ethernet

LCD modules

Dragon can accommodate directly many text module LCDs. See here for the details on text LCD modules.

Graphical LCD modules can also be accommodated thought the use of adapters, see here a color graphical LCD.

I2C bus

Documentation provided with the board

• Getting started with your board (PDF)
• Configuration software (Windows EXE) and USB driver (for Windows 7/Vista/XP 32 bits)
• Board schematic (PDF)

• USB communication example (HDL source code + C code)
• PCI_IORAM reference design (HDL source code)
• PCI WDM reference driver (C source code + compiled)
• Win32 example application to communicate with the PCI WDM driver from a Win32 application (C source code + compiled)
• PCI logic analyzer (HDL source code)
• Ethernet 10BASE-T reference design (HDL source code + C code)
• I2C 'hard macro' support (C code)
• FlashyDemo (FPGA BIT file + GUI)
• Linux source code port (unsupported - see here)

As you can see, there is no 'DLL' or 'Active-X' control, just plain HDL and C code, so that you can understand and use the examples natively into your own application.

To purchase a board

Go to the Shop - FPGA development board (PCI & PCI Express) page.