Sipeed's New Tang Nano 4K Is a $12 FPGA Dev Board Offering HDMI Output, Camera Connectivity

The new Tang Nano 4K is a major upgrade over the original Tang Nano, but has more than doubled the price.

Gareth Halfacree
3 years agoFPGAs

Embedded computing specialist Sipeed has released an upgraded Tang Nano field-programmable gate array (FPGA) development board, dubbed the Tang Nano 4K, which packs a considerably expanded chip into a compact footprint.

Sipeed's Tang Nano was first unveiled two years ago as a sub-$5 stick-format development board built around a Gowin GW1N-1 LittleBee FPGA with 1,152 four-input lookup tables (LUTs), 64Mb of pseudostatic RAM (PSRAM), and a 40-pin interface for an external RGB LCD panel.

Now, the company has launched the Tang Nano 4K — and it's a serious upgrade. Brought to our attention by CNX Software, the Tang Nano 4K ditches the LCD interface in favor of an HDMI output, while adding an interface for an optional OV2640 camera sensor.

The Sipeed Tang Nano 4K is a serious upgrade over the original Tang Nano. (📹: Sipeed)

The chip driving the board has also been swapped out: It's still a Gowin GW1N, but this time the GW1NSR-LV4C — upgrading the specifications to 4,608 LUTs and adding a an Arm Cortex-M3 processing core to the mix. The board still includes 64Mb of PSRAM, alongside 180kB of block SRAM, 256kB of user flash memory, and 32Mb of NOR flash storage. A USB Type-C connector provides data and power connectivity.

The increased specifications do, of course, bring an increased price tag: Where the original Tang Nano sold for under $5, the new model is available on AliExpress starting at $12.

Chinese-language documentation is now available on the Sipeed wiki, with sample code published to GitHub.

Gareth Halfacree
Freelance journalist, technical author, hacker, tinkerer, erstwhile sysadmin. For hire: freelance@halfacree.co.uk.
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