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Saxo & Xylo features
1. FPGA & boot-PROM
The boards are powered by a Xilinx or Altera FPGA, and free FPGA software.- Xilinx FPGA: supported by ISE WebPACK.
- Altera FPGA: supported by Quartus-II Web-Edition.
2. High-speed USB
The boards feature a high-speed USB-2 controller that allows:
- FPGA configuration
- Boot-PROM programming
- Communication PC<-->FPGA, with speeds up to 40 MBytes/s
- JTAG-over-USB (more details below)
3. JTAG
Depending on your board, use either an external JTAG cable, or JTAG-over-USB.
That allows, for example:
4. ARM processor (Saxo-L & Xylo-L/-LM only)
On Saxo-L & Xylo-L/-LM, an ARM processor is present on the board and connected to the FPGA.
The ARM processor is supported by a complete (and free!) C/C++ compiler and source-level debugger development environment (Eclipse). In particular, the boards supports the open source OpenOCD JTAG debugger plus Yagarto and Eclipse, so get a visual development environment that runs natively on Windows.
JTAG-over-USB means that there is no need for a separate JTAG cable. JTAG-over-USB is a lot faster (and reliable) than JTAG cables that run over the parallel port. For example, programming 100KB in the ARM flash typically takes 5 to 6 seconds with JTAG-over-USB.
5. LCD
Text and graphic LCD modules are supported by the boards.
See here a 480x320 monochrome LCD panel driven by Xylo:
6. Flashy
The boards are compatible with Flashy, so they can be used as fast (100MSPS) analog acquisition boards/digital oscilloscopes.
The Flashy boards are mounted on top of the FPGA boards, and have a similar form factor, so make compact acquisition systems.
7. I2C
The boards have an I2C master, and export an I2C bus through a small connector. This is an easy way to control many low-speed peripherals from your PC (IOs, LEDs, LCDs, relays, etc...). An I2C control panel is provided. The I2C can also be controlled programmatically if you need to automate anything.
8. 8051
The on-board USB-2 FX2 controller include an enhanced 8051 microcontroller with 8KB RAM (16KB for Saxo-L & Xylo-EM/-L/-LM). The 8051 is loadable from USB-2 or from an optional I2C EEPROM.9. PLL and DIL-8 oscillator
All cyclone FPGAs have internal PLLs.Xylo and Xylo-EM also have a DIL-8 3.3V oscillator header, so if you need a special frequency that cannot be synthesized from the PLL, you can solder an oscillator directly on the board.
10. Ethernet (Xylo/-EM/-L/-LM only)
The boards support 10BASE-T reception/transmission with the provided soft UDP MAC/PHY core. So you can send and receive data from an Ethernet network at about 10Mbits/s (non-accounting the protocols overhead).
Xylo-LM has two Ethernet ports, while the other board have one.
11. VGA (Xylo/Xylo-EM only)
The boards allow controlling a VGA display (8-colors by default, more if you wire more IOs to the RGB lines). Note that Xylo-EM's VGA port pins are shared with the main board connector, while Xylo's VGA port pins are dedicated.12. SDRAM (Xylo-EM/-LM only)
Xylo-EM features a 16 Mbits SDRAM, while Xylo-LM features a 64 MBits SDRAM (MT48LC1M16A1 and MT48LC4M16A2 or equivalents). This greatly increases the memory available to the FPGA.