Let Whitney Knitter Show You How to Use the New Tria AUBoard-15P FPGA

I don’t know about you, but I find FPGA (field-programmable gate array) boards to be very intimidating. They really are complex beasts with entirely unique workflows. Luckily, Hackster Pro Whitney Knitter is an expert on all things FPGA. In her newest video series, she provides comprehensive guidance on how to start using the new Tria AUBoard-15P FPGA board.

This is the first video in Knitter’s three-part series on the Tria AUBoard-15P. In this video, she goes over the specs of the board, its features and capabilities, and the basics of the workflow.

Starting with the important information about the board itself, the Tria AUBoard-15P is based on the AMD Artix UltraScale+ 15P FPGA. It has a 170,000 programmable logic cells, plus a lot of dedicated hardware. That includes 2GB of ISSI DDR4 RAM and 512Mb of ISSI QSPI flash storage, which is bootable. There is onboard SFP+ 10Gb Ethernet, HDMI 2.0, a set of switches and LEDs, a temperature sensor, and more. There are also several available ports and interfaces, most notably the primary PCIe Gen. 4x4 endpoint interface.

Knitter gives her opinions about that hardware, which are valuable for anyone considering this board. She then goes on to describe how you’ll want to setup and use the board.

That starts with downloading the Avnet BDF (Board Definition File) repository. You’ll be able to use that with AMD Vivado Design Tools to automatically configure connections to the board’s peripherals. But not everything is automatic. You will need to configure the flash memory interface and Knitter has instructions for doing so.

So much of using a board like this is dependent on your specific application, but Knitter covers design strategies that should be relevant to most people. She then ends by demonstrating how to export the XSA file to use in Vitis and PetaLinux.

That’s just the beginning and Knitter’s follow-up videos cover embedded Linux design in PetaLinux and software design in AMD Vitis. We’ll tell you more about those in subsequent articles, so keep an eye out after you take moment to subscribe to Knitter’s YouTube channel.