The development team at Numato Lab has created the Aller Artix-7 FPGA Board with M.2 designed for development and integration of FPGA based accelerated features into other larger designs. Thanks to its standard 2280 M.2 form factor M-key slot the development board can be used with laptops, desktops, and servers.
Aller features a Xilinx Artix-7 100T FPGA, “the second-most powerful FPGA in the Artix-7 family” and has been targeted at developers experimenting with PCI Express based FPGA designs using simple and cost-effective hardware. The Artix-7 100T FPGA features ~101K LUTs, ~126K Flip-flops, ~600KiB Block RAM and 240 DSP slices making it very suitable for acceleration applications. ~ Featuring an onboard Trusted Platform Module (TPM) IC means Aller users can completely offload their security sensitive computations to the FPGA.
Features of the Aller Artix-7 FPGA Board with M.2 Interface include :
– Device: Xilinx Artix 7 FPGA (XC7A100T-1FGG484C)
– DDR3: 2Gb DDR3 ( MT41J128M16JT-125:K TR )
– 4 lane PCIe Gen1 (2.5GT/s)
– Onboard 1Gb QSPI flash memory for FPGA configuration
– JTAG header for programming and debugging
– 100 MHZ CMOS oscillator
– 1 x Trusted Platform Module (AT97SC3205)
– M.2 Connector Interface, M-Key
– Powered from M.2 connector
– 1 RGB LED for custom use
“Nowadays, most of the new laptops come with M.2 M-key slots for NVMe storage modules and Aller can be seamlessly used with those slots. Open source PCI Express IP cores such as litepcie make the development of PCIe designs very cost-effective. Aller is a perfect match for several applications such as hardware accelerators, machine learning, and neural network engines, high hash-rate calculations for blockchain technologies, PCI Express kernel driver development training, digital signal processing, and development and testing of embedded processors.”
“The compact M-key M.2 form-factor provides Aller with a vast number of motherboards and laptops as possible hosts. Most new systems these days ship with an M.2 M-key slot meant for SSDs. So Aller can directly leverage the huge ecosystem of the motherboards. As opposed to A, B or E-keys, the M-key is more common thanks to the SSD popularity and also sports 4x more PCI Express lanes. Since M-key M.2 form-factor supports PCI Express x4, it results in maximum theoretical bandwidth of 1GB/s between Aller and host system, i.e, four times more than competing products.”
The Aller Artix-7 FPGA board is now available for purchase direct from the Numato Lab online store for an introductory price of $399.95 per unit with volume discounts available if required.
Source: Numato Lab
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