Embedded Dev Board Boasts Spartan 7 FPGA With Raspberry Pi Pico RP2040 MCU

When I was a kid, my best friend Jeremy lived just around the corner. I have an old black-and-white picture in my archive. It’s of me and Jeremy when we were 6 years old. We were sitting in a tree, which is where we were often to be found during the evenings and weekends. 

I recently returned from a trip to England to visit my dear old mom and attend her 94th birthday. Jeremy also came to the party. Now, 61 years later, I have another picture of the two of us. Some people say that nostalgia isn’t what it used to be, but I’m here to refute those little rascals because my visit simply oozed in nostalgia (I only hope my brother can get the stains out of his carpet).

As I think I’ve mentioned before, whenever I visit my mom, on the last Friday before my return, a gaggle of techno-geeks gather from the four corners of England. They converge on my brother’s house, arriving around noon (being geeks, they all usually arrive within five minutes of the hour, irrespective of the origins and durations of their journeys). We enjoy a happy afternoon consuming consumables and quaffing beverages (quaffing is like swilling except that—at least in my experience—you tend to spill more down your chest).

In addition to chatting about “this and that” and telling tall tales of derring-do from our youth, we spend the afternoon basking in a geeky “show and tell,” each trying to outdo the others with homegrown creations like game consoles, Nixie-tube clocks, animatronic heads, and the like. There were two new faces this year. We’ll call them Arthur and Ben (because these are their names).

Related:Moving from EagleCad to KiCad

My friend Arthur is one of the world’s foremost experts on cosmic rays. He’s also well known for his animated apiarist activities (he’s an enthusiastic beekeeper). I just heard that, as I pen these words, Arthur is currently rubbing shoulders with astrophysicists, particle physicists, and cosmologists at a shindig somewhere in Italy. Meanwhile, my chum Ben has developed a passive sensor system that uses acoustic beam-forming techniques to detect and track multiple drones. Shortly before our geek gathering, he was to be found in the middle of Salisbury Plain demonstrating his technology to the British Army. 

One person who is usually in attendance, but whose presence was sorely missed on my most recent visit, was my old mate Adam Taylor. Over the years, Adam and I have presented at many of the same technical conferences. We both graduated from Sheffield Hallam University in the UK, albeit two decades apart, which means I have enjoyed 20 extra years honing my experience and skills (that’s my position and I’m sticking to it).

Related:How to Design PCBs Faster (Much, Much Faster)

I was born in Nether Edge and Adam was born in Stannington, both of which are suburbs of Sheffield. Adam has great expertise in FPGA design in general and mission-critical/safety-critical design in particular. He’s also an expert with respect to radiation effects on semiconductors and on the deployment of FPGA-based designs in space. In fact, Adam likes to boast that he’s the first man from Stannington to intentionally launch an FPGA-based system into space, and it’s hard to argue with logic like that.

When I first met Adam deep in the mists of time, he was the engineering manager at a space-focused company in the UK. In 2014, Adam founded Adiuvo Engineering and Training—a high-tech consultancy that provides embedded systems design, training, and marketing services. Growing in leaps and bounds, the mission at Adiuvo is to “create better engineering AND better engineers.”

Adam and his company are often to be found consulting for various space agencies, including NASA and ESA (the European Space Agency). Oftentimes, this involves designing FPGAs and PCBs. Adam is also famous for The MicroZed Chronicles, which is a weekly blog exploring various aspects of FPGA design. To the best of my knowledge, this is the most widely-read FPGA-related blog on the planet. Adam says it had more than 30 million views a few years ago, after which he stopped counting.

The reason I mention all this here is that I just had a video chat with Adam on Zoom. It turned out the reason he hadn’t been able to attend this year’s techno-geek gathering was that he had been called to a top-secret meeting about a top-secret mission. I can say no more, mainly because Adam would say no more (rats!).

One thing Adam did do was to bring me up to date with one of Adiuvo’s recent education-related projects—the Leonidas Spartan 7 & RPI 2040. This is an embedded systems development board that uniquely integrates a Spartan 7 FPGA with a Raspberry Pi Pico RP2040 microcontroller unit (MCU).

Top of Adiuvo’s Leonidas embedded systems development board.  ADIUVO

Bottom of Adiuvo’s Leonidas embedded systems development board.  ADIUVO

FPGAs are awesome when it comes to implementing computationally intensive algorithms in a massively parallel fashion. MCUs are awesome when it comes to control and decision-making functions. So, the combination of FPGAs and MCUs is a marriage made in heaven.

As Adam says, “This combination targets users looking for FPGA capabilities alongside the flexibility of a dual-core ARM Cortex-M0+ processor, all on a single board. It's especially suited for educational purposes and developers transitioning from MCU- to FPGA-based designs. The Leonidas supports a range of applications from simple logic and embedded systems to more advanced image processing tasks, bridging the gap between beginner and intermediate development challenges in the FPGA and embedded system markets.”

Adam also tells me that Adiuvo provides a lot of intellectual property (IP) to help users integrate the FPGA and the RPI; for example, UART to AXI protocol, so the user can employ the Pico’s UART to easily control IP within the FPGA.

Of particular interest to me is the fact that the Leonidas design is totally open source. The design was created in KiCad, which is a free software suite for electronic design automation (EDA). You can access the open-source design here (including user manuals and reference designs).

But wait, there’s more, because Adam tells me that Adiuvo’s AMD Spartan 7 FPGA Tile will soon become available. More specifically, he says prototypes are due in a couple of days (as per the time of this writing), while production boards will be made available later this summer.

CAD representation of Adiuvo’s forthcoming Spartan 7 FPGA Tile. ADIUVO

“Wait, what’s a tile?” I hear you cry. Well, in this context, it’s a printed circuit board (PCB) that’s around the same size of a postage stamp, albeit a largeish postage stamp, in this case.

First reported on Adam’s Hackster.io channel, the goal of this Spartan 7 FPGA Tile is to create a small and low-cost development board that can be used to power a wide range of projects, thereby eliminating the need to design something from scratch every time.

All I can say is that this Spartan 7 Tile looks very, very tasty indeed, and I cannot wait for it to become available. How about you? Do you have any thoughts you’d care to share? If so, please feel free to email me at [email protected].