A10PL4 PCIe FPGA Board

Block Diagram

Altera Arria 10 GX FPGA

Built on 20 nm process technology, the Arria 10 FPGAs feature industry-leading programmable logic that integrates a rich feature set of embedded peripherals, embedded high-speed transceivers, hard memory controllers, and protocol IP controllers. Variable-precision digital signal processing (DSP) blocks integrated with hardened floating point (IEEE 754-compliant) enable the Arria 10 to deliver floating-point performance of up to 1.5 TFLOPS. The FPGA supports Gen3 PCIe x8 via a hard IP block and provides up to 1150K equivalent LEs.

I/O Interfaces

The A10PL4 provides a variety of interfaces for high-speed serial I/O as well as debug support. Two QSFP cages are available on the front panel, each supporting 40GbE or four 10GbE channels. The QSFP SerDes channels are connected directly to the Arria 10 FPGA, thus removing the latency of external PHYs. The QSFP cages can optionally be adapted for SFP+.

The x8 PCIe interface provides 8 SerDes lanes to the Arria 10 FPGA. A USB 2.0 interface with built-in USB-Blaster is available for debug and programming support. The board also supports timestamping with an optional precision timing module, which features 1 PPS and reference clock inputs and outputs along with precision clock circuitry. The timing module option requires a full-height front panel.

Memory

The A10PL4 features up to 32 GBytes of DDR4 with optional error-correcting codes (ECC). Additional on-board memory includes flash memory with factory default and support for multiple FPGA images. An on-board PROM provides access to the board’s MAC ID.

OpenCL™ Support

The A10PL4 supports the Open Computing Language (OpenCL™) programming model, providing an incredibly powerful solution for system acceleration. Development tools for OpenCL include Altera’s SDK for OpenCL and BittWare’s OpenCL Developer’s Bundle.

Board Management Controller

Development Tools

BittWorks II Toolkit

BittWare offers complete software support for the A10PL4 with its BittWorks II software tools. Designed to make developing and debugging applications for BittWare’s boards easy and efficient, the Toolkit is a collection of libraries and applications that provides the glue between the host application and the hardware. A variety of features allow developers to take full advantage of the Arria 10 FPGA capabilities on the BittWare board, including FPGA control via PCIe, Flash programming, custom ISR scripts, and convenient control of FPGA loads. The Toolkit supports 32-bit, and 64-bit Windows and Linux platforms and can connect to the board via PCIe or USB, providing a common API no matter the connection method.

FPGA Development Kit

BittWare’s FPGA DevKit provides FPGA board support IP and integration for BittWare’s Altera FPGA-based boards. The FDK includes FPGA components that provide preconfigured physical interfaces, infrastructure, and examples, drastically cutting development time and easily integrating into existing FPGA development environments.

Working example projects are available for each board which illustrate how to move data between the board’s different interfaces. Supported interfaces include DDR4, DDR3, DDR2, QDR2/+, PCIe, 10GbE, LVDS, SerDes, and Double Data Rate I/O. All example projects are available on BittWare’s Developer Site.