Terasic Prepares a Crowdfunding Campaign for Its Latest FPGA Board: the Atum A3 Nano
Altera Agilex 3-based development board comes with 64MB of SDRAM, gigabit Ethernet, and an HDMI connector as standard.
Field-programmable gate array (FPGA) specialist Terasic, best known as being the producer of the hardware behind the MiSTer emulation project, is preparing to launch a crowdfunding campaign for a new Intel Altera Agilex 3-based development board: the Atum A3 Nano.
"Designed for versatility," the company claims of its latest design, "the Atum A3 Nano includes multiple user I/Os [Inputs/Outputs] (LEDs, buttons, switches), a 2×20 GPIO [General-Purpose Input/Output] connector, and dual PMOD headers to easily integrate cameras or displays. Whether you are developing applications in robotics, automotive solutions, smart city infrastructure, consumer electronics, or advanced image processing, the Atum A3 Nano provides the performance and expandability you need."
At the heart of the compact board is an Intel Altera Agilex 3 A3CZ135BB18AE7S FPGA, featuring 135,110 logic elements, 6.89Mb M20K and 1.4Mbit MLAB memory, 368 18×19 multipliers, four phase-locked loops (PLLs) for input/output and eight for the FPGA fabric. There's 64MB of SDRAM on the board on a 32-bit data bus, with microSD Card storage.
The development board includes gigabit Ethernet connectivity as standard, plus an HDMI port for video and audio. There are four user-addressable LEDs plus two slide switches and two push buttons — and all programming is handled from an on-board USB Blaster III accessible via a USB Type-C connector, in ASx4 mode with 128Mb QSPI flash. This is not, however, used for power; instead, there's a 5VDC barrel jack.
Terasic is preparing to launch a crowdfunding campaign for the board on Crowd Supply in the near future, with interested parties advised to sign up to be notified when it goes live; pricing had not been publicly disclosed at the time of writing.