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- Alchitry Ft Element Board
Meet the Alchitry Ft Element Board! Alchitry Elements are expansion boards similar to Arduino shields or Raspberry Pi HATs that work with your Au and Au+ FPGA Development Boards. The Ft Element is equipped with four 50-pin board to board connectors on the underside and top of the board that snap to the Alchitry Au and Au(+) boards. It also adds a USB 3.0 200MB/s high speed interface to your Alchitry board stack via the USB-C connector.
Please note that this board is only functional with the higher end Au & Au+ FPGA Dev boards that feature the Xilinx Artix 7.
- USB-C connector w/ 200MB/s data rate to board to board connectors
- For use with projects that require data transfer rates greater than standard on board USB to serial 12Mbaud
Alchitry Ft Element Board Product Help and Resources
Programming an FPGA
July 30, 2020
Come look at the basics of working with Field Programmable Gate Arrays.
How Does an FPGA Work?
July 30, 2020
The What, How, Why, and When of Field Programmable Gate Arrays, aka FPGAs
First FPGA Project - Getting Fancy with PWM
July 30, 2020
An initial project using Alchitry's onboard FPGA to manipulate PWM
Core Skill: Programming
If a board needs code or communicates somehow, you're going to need to know how to program or interface with it. The programming skill is all about communication and code.
Skill Level: Expert - You should be extremely comfortable programming on various hardware in several languages.
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Core Skill: Electrical Prototyping
If it requires power, you need to know how much, what all the pins do, and how to hook it up. You may need to reference datasheets, schematics, and know the ins and outs of electronics.
Skill Level: Rookie - You may be required to know a bit more about the component, such as orientation, or how to hook it up, in addition to power requirements. You will need to understand polarized components.
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Customer Reviews
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This board and ecosystem look really neat. However I'm worried the software will be a bigger hurdle than expected. I noticed the product page says it has been tested up 190 MBps. Is this project public so we can study it and use it as a foundation? Ideally something like bidirectional data transfer between the DDR and a desktop python program.
Some of the "elements" of the descriptions/features were a "bit" confusing to me until I looked at the schematics and saw that the board used an FTDI FT600Q - USB 3.0 to FIFO Bridge: Description "a USB 3.0 200MB/s high speed interface"; Features, "a USB 3.0 200MB/s high speed interface" vs. "200 Mbps* ~ 191 Mbaud*"; Video, "USB 3.0 200MB/s (mega bytes per second) high speed interface". Were you talking about bytes per second or bits per second and what USB standard transfer rate (High Speed/SuperSpeed/etc.)?
The FT600Q: Supports USB 3.0 Super Speed (5Gbps)/USB2.0 High Speed (480Mbps)/USB 2.0 Full Speed (12Mbps) Control/Bulk/Interrupt transfers with 16 kilobytes of buffer(s) and a 16-bit 100MHz parallel FIFO bus. (16-bit * 100MHz = 1600Mbps = 200MB/s) https://www.ftdichip.com/Support/Documents/DataSheets/ICs/DS_FT600Q-FT601Q%20IC%20Datasheet.pdf