Overview This board provides all the necessary basic components needed in most of FPGA-based designs. Special care has been dedicated to routing topology and signal integrity. Most of the I/Os are routed to ERmet® 2mm Hard Metric connectors complying to the international standard IEC 61076-4-101. By combining two or more Virtex-II boards and using partitioning software you can easily distribute your design over several FPGAs to cope with complex designs that exceed the scope of a single FPGA. The Virtex-II development board gives you an ideal platform for evaluating, implementing, testing, and extending custom designs using Virtex-II devices. You can also easily integrate the board into a larger system. The board is equipped with onboard power supplies and can be operated from a single 5V to 24V power supply. This makes it great for teaching, seminars, and courses.		Figure 1: Top view of the Virtex-II prototyping board

Key Features

The Virtex-II prototyping module contains a Xilinx Virtex-II FPGA in the FF1152 package. This board is especially suited to test digital circuits during the early stages of their development. You can easily attach a logic analyzer and watch the signals in real time. The high count of system gates enables you to implement circuits that reach the complexity of ASICs. The configuration data of the FPGA is downloadable using one of four modes (master serial mode (XChecker), slave serial mode (SPROM), boundary scan ode (JTAG) and SelectMAP mode). The following block diagram shows the functional blocks of the board:

Figure 2: Block diagram of the Virtex-II prototyping board

Six banks of general I/Os of the FPGA are routed to ERmet 2mm Hard Metric connectors, four connectors for ground based signals and one differential signal connector. If you use I/O standards that need reference voltages, you can select up to seven different voltage levels for all six banks individually with DIP-switches.

A fast asynchronous static RAM and an optional dual port RAM help you to support memory demanding implementations like imaging and telecommunication applications.

By connecting several boards you may implement circuits whose complexity is beyond the scope of a single FPGA. The whole stack is configurable with a single download by externally daisy chaining the JTAG chain.

Figure 3: Top and bottom view of ribbon cable/header connector adapters

To facilitate the connection of external hardware or further Virtex-II boards, we created adapters for both ground referenced and differential signals. The adapters enable you to connect ribbon cables to standard 0.1 inch header connectors as well as oscilloscopes and logic analyzers. Four adapters allow the easy access of the ground referenced signals and one similar adapter is provided for the low voltage differential signals.

A total of 16 clock sources can be connected using coaxial SMB connectors. Two clocks are either an onboard crystal oscillator or an external source. The other sources are always external sources. It is also possible to output a clock from the FPGA via these connectors.

Figure 4: Bottom view of the Virtex-II prototyping board

The crystal oscillators are housed in standard DIL-8 or DIL-14 size metal cans plugged into sockets, so you can easily change the frequency.

A voltage supervisor circuit generates a short pulse of ca. 2ms duration whenever the core supply voltage (VCCINT) drops below 1.3V and on power up. Such a reset pulse is also generated when you press the reset button.

A real time clock (RTC) with lithium battery is available for applications that need date/time information. The battery also keeps the DES key RAM of the FPGA from loosing its contents.

9 pole female D-Sub connector and a transceiver device provide a mean to connect serial devices like a PC to the prototyping board. The transceiver performs the voltage level translation and ESD protection of the RxD and TxD lines. The UART functionality must be implemented in the FPGA. Differential line drivers (RS-422) may be used instead of the RS-232 drivers to achieve bit rates in excess of 10Mb/s.

A ISP SCP (XC1800 family) module is pluggable to the board. You can program these SCPs using the JTAG mode. This PROM module enables you to quickly change the FPGA configuration without the need for download equipment.

Figure 5: Pluggable SPROM module

Push buttons, DIP-switches, LEDs and an LCD form a user interface that allows you to provide configuration data and monitor status information from the running system.

Figure 6: Board with external connections

Two eight-position DIP switches are available for user specific applications. The twelve push buttons can be used to input user data. One push button is connected to the voltage supervisor which generates a short pulse when this button is pressed.

A row with 16 LEDs may function as a display for status and error messages.

A liquid crystal display with 4 lines with 20 character, green-yellow back light and parallel interface provides an advanced mean for displaying more detailed debugging information during development.

A text-to-speech processor and an audio power amplifier form a text-to-speech unit that accepts ASCII input via a SPI port and converts it to spoken audio. A loud speaker is mounted on the bottom side of the board. You can listen to the sample phrase: "Hello, ErSt Electronic presents the new prototyping board for Xilinx Virtex-2 FPGA. Have a nice day."

Three DC/DC converters generate all necessary low voltages from a single 5V to 24V input. Seven reference voltages are derived from the 3.3V converter.

• 563 KB Virtex-II Prototyping Board, User Manual
• 138 KB Example code and tools for Virtex-II prototyping board

You may also find it interesting to read our Xcell Journal Online article about this product:

• Xcell Journal Online, Xcell 47: For Complex Designs, More is Better

Package Contents

• Prototyping board, completely configured and tested
• One SPROM module, preloaded with a demo program
• Four 0.1 inch header connector adapters for ground referenced signals
• One 0.1 inch header connector adapter for low voltage differential signals
• A pair of red/black power cables with 4mm connector
• A printed user manual with schematic and layout diagrams
• A CD-ROM with documentation, data sheets, example code and tools