icoBoard Small FPGA Board with Lattice iCE40

By Trenz Electronic 88

icoBoard Small FPGA Board with Lattice iCE40

Trenz Electronic's icoBoard contains a Lattice FPGA with 8 k LUT, 100 MHz maximum clock, 8 MBit of SRAM, and is programmable in Verilog by a complete open-source FPGA toolchain. The icoBoard is pin-compatible with the Raspberry Pi 2B and all versions and any board using the same pinout. Bitstreams for programming the FPGA can be directly generated on the Raspberry Pi.

The ICE40 FPGA is a low-cost FPGA without special hardware blocks like multipliers or SerDes or SDRAM interfaces. With its 8 k LUT it is one of the smaller FPGAs, but large enough to hold substantial projects like a complete RISC-V 32-bit SoC. The icoBoard is a perfect learning tool to get the feet wet with logic circuit design in Verilog without having to do the heavy lifting of the professional huge programming tools from Xilinx or Altera. The Pmod connectors make it very easy to work with a wide variety of sensors and interfaces. A selection of PMod sensors can be found at https://www.digikey.com/en/product-highlight/d/digilent/pmods.

If the icoBoard is connected to the Raspberry Pi, power is supplied by the Raspberry Pi. If the icoBoard is operated standalone, 5 V of power needs to be provided to the power supply pins.

Features
  • Lattice ICE40HX8k
  • Mainly for learners and tinkerers
  • Supported by the open source toolchain icoTC consisting of Yosys, ArachnePnR, and IceStorm
  • Four Pmod connectors with unbuffered 3.3 V interfaces
  • 4 x 16 100 mils I/O connectors
  • 16-bit-wide 8 MBit SRAM
  • 8-bit-wide 64 MBit HyperRAM
  • 16 MByte SPI Flash memory for storing 4 bitstreams or data
  • Three programmable status LEDs, green
  • Two push buttons
  • Four flat flex connectors with 36 3.3 I/O lines each

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