Selecting a device (Noob Question)

Question

I'm looking to embark on my first programmable logic project and would like some advice on which device family could be appropriate. My system requirements are as follows:

Supply: 3V3

Approximatly 30 I/O pins

Low power

an ADC would be nice but not essential

Communicate via a serial interface

Fast start up time is not required

Physical size should be kept to a minimum

To be completely honest I have no real idea at this stage how much block/flash I will need, I'm assuming not too much as the the device will essentially be used to create pulses and control logic circuitry on a small Tx/Rx board. I was thinking perhaps a low end MAX10 may be suitable, or would this be a little overkill?

Thanks for reading

altera_forum · Answer

Buy one of the relatively low-cost evaluation systems available from Terasic or Arrow first. You can learn how to use the tools and actually implement your design on it, perhaps with some add-on hardware, before designing your own system.

altera_forum · Answer

MAX 10 offers you all that, including the ADC. Adding an external ADC to one of the other low end, cheap families (which don't have an ADC) is likely to end up costing much the same but add more complexity to your board and code.

As Leon suggested, I too recommend you buy a development kit. The max 10 fpga evaluation kit (https://www.altera.com/products/boards_and_kits/dev-kits/altera/kit-max-10-evaluation.html) is ideally suited to your needs and is cheap. Integrated ADC is pretty easy to put to use via Altera's software tools. Arrow's bemicro max 10 (http://parts.arrow.com/item/detail/arrow-development-tools/bemicromax10) is very similar.

I'm not aware of any other low-end development boards with ADC's which means you'd need to add a daughter board (or similar) to gain that functionality. If you don't want the ADC (as you suggest) then there are plenty of options. Have a look at some of these:

Arrow's bemicro cv (http://parts.arrow.com/item/detail/arrow-development-tools/bemicrocv)

Terasic's de0-nano development and education board (http://www.terasic.com.tw/cgi-bin/page/archive.pl?language=english&no=593)

Terasic's de0 board (http://www.terasic.com.tw/cgi-bin/page/archive.pl?language=english&no=364)

Cheers,

Alex

altera_forum · Answer

Hi, perhaps you can refer to Altera Product Catalogue for the requirement that you are looking for

https://www.altera.com/content/dam/altera-www/global/en_us/pdfs/literature/sg/product-catalog.pdf

Else you also can contact Altera sales team for more details based on your requirement

altera_forum · Answer

Great, Thanks. Already sent off for Arrows dev board this morning :)

altera_forum · Answer

Hi JackW,  Just to add on that you can also use the online tool at Altera web (https://www.altera.com/products/product-selector-guide.html) - product selector tool to help in selecting part.

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Selecting a device (Noob Question)

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