Future Adds To Blox Board Family

Latest news from the Embedded World show in Nuremberg is Future Electronics plans to extend the reach of its Blox development boards to embrace products from Microchip and Actel.

The ConnectNet MicroBlox is ailed at developers using Microchip's PIC32MX5, MX6 and MX7 family of microcontrollers. The board features the PIC32MX795F512L MCU alongside an A3P250-1FGG256 ProASIC3 FPGA from Actel. With many 32-bit microcontroller-based designs using programmable logic, Future has used the ProASIC3 as a programmable LCD controller and memory interface, as well as to perform data flow management. By implementing LCD control in an FPGA, it can help avoid the obsolescence problems common with dedicated display driver ASICs. The code for all the ProASIC3 implementations is freely available.

The ProASIC MicroBlox and Igloo MicroBlox boards are there to support users of Actel's flash-based FPGAs.

The boards both offer system-level functions including power management, external Flash and pSRAM memory and an RS-232 interface. The ProASIC3 board carries an M1A3P1000-FGG484 FPGA, and the IGLOO board an M1AGL1000V2-FGG484. Both devices feature a Cortex M1 Processor core, have 1,000,000 gates and are pin compatible.

 

Both boards include a variety of extra features to facilitate rapid hardware development, including: programming/debugging circuit interfacing to USB; support for the Libero integrated development environment; VHDL implementations of key functions such as real-time clock and watchdog, memory controller, support for ARM Cortex-M1 core, encryption, memory card controller, SPI, I²C and PWM modules and LCD controller; and Example code