Spartan Edge Accelerator Board – Arduino FPGA Shield with ESP32

19 September, 2019

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Spartan Edge Accelerator Board is a Xilinx Spartan FPGA development board in the Arduino UNO shield form factor. With the onboard ESP32 chip, it can also provide WiFi and Bluetooth functions.

Arduino – cheap to buy, easy to learn, simple to use, but can’t deal with complex calculations and large projects.

FPGA – flexible and powerful, easily handle complex calculations like audio and video processing, but hard to learn and very expensive.

What if combine the two? Will there be a monster that is expensive, cumbersome and difficult to understand? Of cause not, it will be magic! It will be a game-changer that combines the advantages of Arduino and FPGA and eliminates the shortcomings of both. We present to you the Spartan Edge Accelerator Board!

Spartan Edge Accelerator Board is a Xilinx Spartan FPGA development board in the Arduino UNO shield form factor. It can work with Arduino as an FPGA shield and as a stand-alone FPGA development board. With the onboard ESP32 chip, the Spartan Edge Accelerator Board also features 2.4GHz WiFi and Bluetooth 4.1. Moreover, this development board has a wealth of peripherals and interfaces which are extremely playable. Such as an 8-bit ADC, a 6-axis accelerometer, two RGB LEDs, a MINI HDMI interface, a CSI camera interface, two Grove interfaces, etc. All in all, it will be a perfect FPGA board for Makers and Hobbyists.

FPGA

The Spartan Edge Accelerator Board is built around Xilinx Spartan-7 XC7S15 FPGA, which is a cost-effect but powerful FPGA chip. When it comes to Ardunio FPGA, the first mover Arduino MKR Vidor 4000 was always mentioned. Compared with the official Arduino MKR Vidor 4000, the Spartan Edge Accelerator Board has a similar performance, but the price is less than half! Spartan Edge Accelerator Board can run at up to 100Mhz clock speed and offers 12.8K logic cells, 360Kb block RAM. Well, to drive a camera or HDMI display is just a piece of cake. Besides we breakout 10 user-programmable I/O pins of XC7S15, you can configure them as PWM, I2C, I2S, UART, SPI, etc.

ESP32

We know you love ESP32, so we used it as the wireless core. It supports 802.11 b/g/n 2.4GHz WiFi as well as Bluetooth 4.1 with BLE. Just a single board to enable your Arduino with FPGA and Wireless function, isn’t it amazing?

Arduino FPGA API

On top of that, we provide a full Arduino FPGA API to help you use FPGA resources to control FPGA I/Os with Arduino IDE even if you know nothing about the FPGA theory. Spartan Edge Accelerator Board will equip Arduino with the ability that was once unimaginable, such as edge technology, image recognition, signal sampling and processing, and so on.