Low-Cost Eval Kit Sports FPGA

Nov. 15, 2004

The Altium LiveDesign evaluation kit, which costs $99, comes with a choice of either the Altera Cyclone EP1C12F324C8 or the Xilinx Spartan-3 XC3S400-4FG456C FPGA device on the evaluation board. The board also includes RAM, connectors, LEDs, and audio support. It connects to the PC via the parallel port. The kit comes with an evaluation copy of Altium's Unified Nexar-Protel 2004 software, which normally costs $9995. Nexar-Protel includes a number of ready-to-use FPGA-based components and processor cores. Over 10 reference designs are included. A more sophisticated evaluation platform, Altium's NanoBoard, goes for $995. It utilizes the same Nexar-Protel software.

www.altium.com

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William G. Wong

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

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