FPGA expansion board eases development of low-cost security access control applications

Texas Instruments Inc.’s Stellaris FPGA Expansion Board for the DK-LM3S9B96 development kit enables developers to easily evaluate the high bandwidth machine-to-machine (M2M) parallel interface capability of the Stellaris microcontroller’s flexible External Peripheral Interface (EPI).

Featuring data widths up to 32 bits and data rates up to 150MBps, the M2M mode of EPI enables developers of low-cost security access control applications to interface cameras or low-resolution video with a Stellaris MCU, which can provide cost-effective Ethernet communication of processed, encoded imagery. In such systems, while the dedicated video processing will be handled by an FPGA or DSP, the encoded images are communicated via the on-chip Ethernet MAC+PHY of a Stellaris MCU.

The expansion board includes a Xilinx Spartan 3E FPGA with 100,000 system gates, 1/13in CMOS VGA (640x480) Color Camera Module, 1x6 header for FPGA programming and Xilinx JTAG connector. It also has 1MB of asynchronous 10ns SRAM for graphics/video buffers and 1kb of I2C memory for storing configuration data. Eight FPGA test pads provide five inputs and three I/Os available for user prototyping of application-specific FPGA processing tasks.

Texas Instruments Inc.