SparkFun's New MicroMod Processor Board Packs an Arduino-Compatible Snō FPGA
Based on an Intel MAX 10 with 16k LEs, this FPGA can be filled with "Xcelerator Blocks" from the Arduino IDE.
SparkFun has announced another entry in its MicroMod family of modular development boards, this time adding a new Arduino-compatible field-programmable gate array (FPGA) option in the form of the SparkFun MicroMod Alorium Sno M2 Processor Board.
Launched roughly two years ago, SparkFun's MicroMod platform aims to do away with the need to replace development boards each time a project grows too demanding for a given processor or requires additional peripherals. In a MicroMod project the processor is placed on a separate board based on an M.2-style edge-connector, which then mates with any of a number of carrier boards. Need a more powerful processor? Just pop out the existing one and replace it with another, without having to ditch the entire board.
Now, those building in the MicroMod ecosystem have a new Processor Board option: the SparkFun MicroMod Alorium Sno M2 Processor Board. "Snō's FPGA provides a reconfigurable hardware platform that hosts an 8-bit AVR instruction set, compatible with the ATmega328, making Snō fully compatible with the Arduino IDE," SparkFun explains. "[The] Snō SoM [System On Module] has a compact footprint, making it ideal for space-constrained applications and an obvious addition to our MicroMod form factor for prototyping."
Based on the Intel Max 10 FPGA, the Alorium Snō offers 16k logic elements which are designed to be filled using the company's "Xcelerator Block" library — creating dedicated hardware resources for tasks ranging from servo control and quadrature encoding to LED addressing and accelerated floating-point arithmetic, all of which can be added into a project from within the Arduino IDE itself.
The processor board also includes 32 dedicated digital input/output pins, six of which can be used as analog inputs, and 2kB of static RAM (SRAM) alongside 32kB of flash program memory. The chip can run at 16MHz or 32MHz, uses 3.3V logic, while the board includes an unpopulated JTAG header for direct FPGA programming.
The new SparkFun MicroMod Alorium Sno M2 Processor Board is now available on the SparkFun store, priced at $49.95 before volume discounts.