Some readers may remember, we attempted to design a Spartan 6 based FPGA development board with DDR SDRAM almost a year ago. The board worked to the most part except that some obvious mistakes made it impossible to get the DDR up running. We did another attempt this year to design a new board with […]
Tag: Saturn
Introduction Designing and building an FPGA development board that has two BGA devices was challenging enough. But what came next did seem equally challenging to us in the beginning. That challenge was testing the functionality of the DDR interface. We had no prior experience of successfully building a board with a DDR device. And those […]
For those who ordered Spartan 6 + ATSAM, here is the schematics and PCB layout. As mentioned earlier, this board is never assembled or tested. There are some known issues with the physical boards distributed. The SUSPEND pin of the FPGA is left floating, and may cause problems during configuration (this is fixed in the […]
Its been almost a year since we completely switched to KiCad. It was a great experience working with KiCad. No schematic page limits, no board size limits, built in online DRC and what not. The online DRC feature itself making the switch worth because we are completely out the DRC->FIX ERROR->DRC… cycle in Eagle. Yeh, […]