The Tiny iCESugar-nano Packs an FPGA, RISC-V Core, and iCELink Into a Compact Footprint

Muse Lab has launched a new entry in its iCESugar family of open source field-programmable gate array (FPGA) development boards, the compact iCESugar-nano — powered by a Lattice Semiconductor iCE40LP1k and a RISC-V core.

"iCESugar-nano is an open source FPGA development board based on Lattice iCE40LP1k-CM36 designed and made by Muse Lab," the company explains of its new hardware. "It's fully supported by the open source toolchain (yosys & nextpnr & icestorm)."

The compact board features three PMOD connectors, which serve to break out all the available input/output (IO) pins on the FPGA. An iCELink debugger, based on Arm's Mbed DAPLink, for debugging and drag-and-drop programming — making installation of a new bitstream as simple as using a USB flash drive.

"Besides," Muse Lab adds, "the iCELink provides a adjustable clock to FPGA and a additional USB CDC serial port direct connecting to FPGA. Just with one [USB] Type-C cable, you can start to develop and test the board."

The FPGA at the heart of the iCESugar-nano has 1,280 look-up tables (LUTs), 8kB of static RAM (SRAM), and a phase-locked loop (PLL). The 14 general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins are brought out to two 6-pin PMOD headers at either side of the board and one 12-pin header at the end, opposite the USB Type-C connector for data and power. For additional storage, there's a 2MB SPI flash chip on-board.

The board is now available to order on the Muse Lab Tindie store at $19; schematics and source code are available on the project's GitHub repository under an unspecified open source license.