Monday, June 11, 2012

Altera EPM3256A CPLD Breakout

A few months ago I received my newly designed breakout boards from Laen's OSH Park PCB service and finally had time to assemble my new boards. Stepping up from my original EPM3032A board I went to the EPM3256A here in its final assembled form:




With this new board I only broke out about 100 or so pins of the 208 pin package, this will be more than enough for the projects I have planned with it. I added a few features to it including an on-board socketed crystal with options for 3.3v or 5v operation. I also have options to route the clock to the global clock input or a specified general purpose io pin depending on the application.

A couple nice features about the MAX3000 series specifically to the EPM3256A:

- 3.3v and 5v compatibility. Makes interfacing existing logic very easy.
- 256 macrocells available. Small compared to modern FPGAs, but is enough to be very useful.
- 158 Usable i/o pins.

I will be posting some projects based on this board very soon.

1 comment:

  1. Very nice board!
    PS: I talk about CPLD/FPGA in blog: http://electro-logic.blogspot.it (english version on right panel)

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