Design-In Spartan 7 FPGA Tile Speeds Embedded Project DevelopmentDesign-In Spartan 7 FPGA Tile Speeds Embedded Project Development

This solution is ideal for developers who wish to take full advantage of an FPGA without having to learn how to create the FPGA portion of the design.

Clive 'Max' Maxfield

September 23, 2024

6 Min Read
Design-In Spartan 7 FPGA Tile Speeds Embedded Systems
ADIUVO

At a Glance

  • ADIUVO’s Spartan 7 FPGA Tile can be quickly and easily designed-in to an embedded system.
  • The tile can be used to power a wide range of embedded projects, including controllers and sensor aggregators/fusion.

In an earlier column (see "Embedded Dev Board Boasts Spartan 7 FPGA With Raspberry Pi Pico RP2040 MCU," I made mention of my friend Adam Taylor, who is the founder of a high-tech consultancy called Adiuvo Engineering and Training. With a mission to “create better engineering AND better engineers,” Adiuvo provides embedded systems design, training, and marketing services.

I don’t think anyone would disagree that most of today’s embedded systems are powered by microcontroller units (MCUs) or microprocessor units (MPUs). Now, I love MCUs and MPUs as much as the next engineer, but it needs to be acknowledged that some data and signal processing tasks require a lot of “umph” (I’m sorry if I’m getting too technical). This is why discerning designers are casting their orbs in the direction of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), whose silicon fabric can be configured to implement any functionality those designers desire, including processing vast amounts of data in a massively parallel fashion.

On the other hand, it must also be acknowledged that, when working with MCUs, which typically require only a single power supply, you pretty much drop the device on your board, connect it to any sensors and actuators, and you’re “off to the races” (I know I’m simplifying things, but you get the idea). By comparison, although FPGA devices offer performance, flexibility, versatility, and configurability, they also require multiple power supplies and myriad support components, which means using one of these components for the first time is not for the faint of heart.

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

Well, if you are an embedded system designer who is interested in taking advantage of FPGAs to power your embedded systems—possibly acting as co-processors or hardware accelerators to MCUs, MPUs, or application processors (APs)—then I have exciting news because the folks at Adiuvo have formally announced their Spartan 7 FPGA Tile, which can be quickly and easily designed-in to an embedded system.

max-0071-01-sparten-7-fpga-tile.jpg

So, why would one be persuaded to purchase this particular product? After all, lots of companies—including FPGA vendors themselves—offer a wide variety of evaluation and development boards. Well, first and foremost, this is neither an evaluation board nor a development board; rather, it’s a design-in tile that can be dropped directly into your embedded system. The back of the tile is flat (i.e., no components), which means the tile can sit flush with the main board onto which it is attached by means of its through-hole vias and/or castellated edges (i.e., plated half-holes presented as rampart-like structures along the edges of the tile).

Related:How Can Embedded Engineers Implement Edge AI Applications?

The thing is that Adam and his colleagues are hardened engineers who are used to “working in the trenches.” They specialize in designing mission-critical and safety-critical products, and they are often to be found consulting for various space agencies, including NASA and ESA (the European Space Agency).

I’ll tell you more about Spartan 7 FPGA Tile in a moment, but first I want to tell you a bit more about Adam to establish his “street cred,” as it were. Adam and I were both born and bred in Sheffield, England. Adam graduated from my own alma mater—Sheffield Hallam University (it was Sheffield Polytechnic when I attended)—with an honors degree in Electronics. This was in 2000, which was 20 years after yours truly (which means I have two decades more maturity and experience—at least, that’s the way I like to think about it).

Part of Adam’s course included working with FPGAs, which didn’t even exist when I was a student. His first job out of college was at Raytheon in Harlow, England, designing digital signal processing (DSP) systems for radar systems using Xilinx FPGAs. 

As an aside, the Raytheon Co. was a major U.S. defense contractor and industrial corporation with manufacturing concentrations in weapons and military and commercial electronics. The company that was to become Raytheon was originally established in 1922 (102 years ago as I pen these words) by the American engineer, inventor, scientist, and Professor Vannevar Bush, who is best known for creating the world’s first large-scale analog computer—the Differential Analyzer—at MIT in 1931.

Related:Balancing the Promise, Progress, & Problems of AI

It didn’t take long before Adam was heading the project’s hardware team. A few years later, he transferred to the British defense and security company Ultra Electronics to develop FPGAs for use in control systems for nuclear reactors in submarines. This is when Adam honed his skills in high-reliability, mission-critical, and safety-critical design. It’s also where he learned how to mitigate the effects of radiation—like single event upsets (SEUs)—in FPGAs.

Later, Adam did some contracting for different companies, working on things like high-performance image processing and high-speed cryptography, all using FPGAs. Still later, he moved into the space industry where he created FPGA-based designs for use in satellites.

Eventually, all these experiences came to a head when Adam founded Adiuvo Engineering and Training in 2014, which is ten years ago at the time of this writing. Since that time, Adiuvo has gone from strength to strength. Along the way, Adam and his colleagues have worked with many MCU/MPU-based embedded systems designers who were unsure of the best way to dip their toes into the FPGA waters. This is one of the reasons that spurred them to develop their Spartan 7 FPGA Tile.

This tile is ideal for developers who wish to take full advantage of an FPGA without having to learn how to create the FPGA portion of the design. All that is required is for the tile to be incorporated into the system and programmed, after which it will run on power-up like a microcontroller.

A few key features are as follows:

  • 59 mm x 59 mm

  • Runs from a single 5 V supply (the supply voltage can be 4.5 to 18 V)

  • Consumes <100 mA

  • 32 kB on-board SRAM

  • 100 MHz on-board oscillator

  • 23k LEs, 80 DSPs, 45 BRAMs

  • 70+ GPIOs 

  • Programmed via USB or JTAG

  • Can be mounted directly on the main PCB

The tile is supported by free design and verification tools from AMD. Also, a free soft RISC-V microcontroller IP is available (this consumes <15% of the tile’s LE resources). Furthermore, in addition to a User Guide, Schematic, and Reference Designs, a layout footprint in Altium Designer is available to help accelerate designs.

The metaphorical cream on top of the allegorical cake (at least, as far as I’m concerned) is that Adam is currently working on a tutorial for a TinyML (machine learning) application that will run on the RISC-V soft microcontroller core. What’s not to love?

I think this is great, but it’s not all about me (it should be, but it’s not). What do you think about all this? As always, I welcome your insightful comments, penetrating questions, and sagacious suggestions (please feel free to email me at [email protected]).

About the Author

Clive 'Max' Maxfield

Clive "Max" Maxfield is a freelance technical consultant and writer. Max received his BSc in Control Engineering in 1980 from Sheffield Hallam University, England and began his career as a designer of central processing units (CPUs) for mainframe computers. Over the years, Max has designed everything from silicon chips to circuit boards and from brainwave amplifiers to Steampunk Prognostication Engines (don't ask). He has also been at the forefront of Electronic Design Automation (EDA) for more than 35 years.

Well-known throughout the embedded, electronics, semiconductor, and EDA industries, Max has presented papers at numerous technical conferences around the world, including North and South America, Europe, India, China, Korea, and Taiwan. He has given keynote presentations at the PCB West conference in the USA and the FPGA Forum in Norway. He's also been invited to give guest lectures at several universities in the US and at Oslo University in Norway. In 2001, Max "shared the stage" at a conference in Hawaii with former Speaker of the House, "Newt" Gingrich.

Max is the author and/or co-author of a number of books, including Designus Maximus Unleashed (banned in Alabama), Bebop to the Boolean Boogie (An Unconventional Guide to Electronics), EDA: Where Electronics Begins, FPGAs: Instant Access, and How Computers Do Math.

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