PLEASE NOTE: This article is obsolete or related to a discontinued product.

COLIBRI-250 a low cost FPGA development board

The COLIBRI-250 board is the smallest and cheapest devboard available to evaluate the Microsemi/Actel ProASIC3 FPGA model A3P250 (250Kgates).

The Microsemi/Actel ProASIC3 flash-based FPGA chip offers a breakthrough in power, price, performance, density, and features for today's most demanding high-volume applications" (Microsemi web site).

Two completely separate address banks of 256K x 16 bits CMOS SRAM with 12ns of access time which allow fast data collecting capabilities and four 20x2 pin strips 2.54 mm (100 mils) pitch to have a comfortable class='acmetable' access to the FPGA I/O lines.

The I/O lines deliver signals to/from the FPGA fabric logic with performance of more than 300 MHz for signals and standard 3.3 Volt logic levels with LVDS capable interfaces.

A JTAG connector fully compatible with the Microsemi Flash Pro4 is available to program the FPGA from the Libero IDE tools.

Schematic

Libero - The Integrated Design Environment (IDE) for FPGA programming

To design your hardware on the FPGA a renewable 1 year free license of Libero is available from the Microsemi web site.

With Libero it is possible to edit, synthesize and simulate your FPGA application starting from VHDL/Verilog code obtaining an object file that can be transferred in the FPGA Flash memory through the Actel JTAG programmer available with the COLIBRI Starter Kit.