Sipeed Unveils the Ultra-Compact Tang Primer 25K FPGA Module and Dock Carrier Board

Sipeed has announced a new entry in its Tang family of field-programmable array (FPGA) devices, the Tang Primer 25K — with a tiny module sitting in compact carrier board and boasting support for USB connectivity and vintage games console emulation.

"[The] Tang Primer 25K is a minuscule core board (23×18mm [around 0.91×0.71"]) design based on [the Gowin] GW5A-LV25MG121, accompanied by a 25K Dock base board that exposes all pins (excluding MIPI high-speed pins)," Sipeed says of its latest FGPA board design, brought to our attention by Linux Gizmos. "The ultra-small core board size can be applied in any volume-restricted scenarios."

The heart of the module is, as Sipeed says, the Gowin Semi GW5A-LV25MG121 FPGA, giving it 23,040 four-input look-up tables (LUTs), 180kb of distributed static RAM (SRAM), 1,008kb of block SRAM (B-SRAM), 28 18×18 multipliers, six phase-locked loops (PLLs), and eight input/output (IO) banks, plus 64Mb of NOR flash memory on a tiny module with two 60-pin board-to-board connectors underneath.

These connectors are designed to link up to the Tang Primer 25K Dock carrier board, without which you'll find experimentation difficult. This breaks out the FPGA's features to 0.1" pin headers and three PMOD expansion headers — and includes a 40-pin general-purpose input/output (GPIO) header which can be used to add an optional SDRAM module.

With this SDRAM module in place, the company claims, it's possible to run soft-cores emulating various pieces of vintage gaming hardware — using the module's USB connectivity, brought out to a Type-A connector at one end, for a game pad.

Sipeed is taking orders for the board on its AliExpress store at $19 for the module alone or $29 with the carrier board; the SDRAM module is an additional $10. More information is available on the Sipeed wiki.