Spartan 6 evaluation board is an evaluation board/kit primarily designed for use with Xilinx Spartan 6 devices. In case you have been wondering what the board is used for, we have explained everything in this article.
What is the Evaluation Board Used for?
An evaluation board is dedicated to the testing or “evaluation” of a circuit board component. In this case, the Spartan 6 evaluation board is used to test the components of the Xilinx Spartan 6 devices ahead of their design and prototyping with an FPGA development board.
What You Need to Know about the Xilinx Spartan 6 FPGA SP605 Evaluation Kit
The Spartan 6 FPGA SP605 is one of the foremost evaluation kits or boards from Xilinx. It is now discontinued, but it has a wide range of testing peripherals that help confirm the feasibility of the FPGA components.
As an out-of-the-box evaluation board, it packs most of the components, reference designs and hardware needed to evaluate and test the working conditions of the circuit board components.
It features the Spartan 6 XC6SLX45T-FGG484-3C Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). Below is a table showing some of the technical attributes of the Spartan 6 SP605 Evaluation Board.
| Technical Attributes | Description |
| Number of I/O Pins | 296 |
| Number of Logic Cells | 43,661 |
| Number of 3.2 Gb/s Transceivers | 4 |
| Memory Size (kb) | 2,088 |
| Number of DSP Slices | 58 |
Features of the Spartan 6 Evaluation Board
The board features an expandable Input and Output (I/O) port, enabled by the FPGA Mezzanine Card (FMC) interface.
1. Network Application Development
It is possible to develop robust network applications with the Spartan 6 evaluation board. The estimated speed of the applications is between 10 and 1000 Megabytes per second (Mbps).
2. High-Performance Configurations
The Spartan 6 evaluation board also boasts of a higher performing connection. It is enabled by the high-performance serial connectivity with GTP ports the FMC, SFP and SMA.
Benefits of Working with the Spartan 6 Evaluation Board
The Spartan 6 evaluation board offers a considerable advantage over the development board. One of the major differences is that the evaluation board helps you test the components before they are even delegated for use in building applications with the development board.
These are some of the benefits of working with the Spartan 6 evaluation board:
Product Testing
The Spartan 6 evaluation board allows a digital designer to test the components to be sure they are a good fit for the targeted applications.
Enough Space
The Spartan 6 evaluation board provides you with a lot of space to work with when testing or evaluating the components.
You also have access to several test points to aid the evaluation and analyses of the components.
Multiple Interconnections
The Spartan 6 evaluation board also has a wide range of interconnections. These serve as interfaces through which the evaluation board can be interconnected with other systems, including a power converted module.
Conclusion
Working with the Spartan 6 evaluation board helps you to confirm the better working conditions of FPGA components before they can be added to a new design.
