You must have heard about development boards if you are familiar with electronics manufacturing. Development boards are widely used across the electronics industry. FPGA development boards provide great benefits over traditional semiconductors. Also, these boards have taken over the industry and they are gradually used for various types of medical tasks.
Xilinx is popularly known for designing great development boards. The Xilinx development boards are widely used across several industries.
What is a Development Board?
The FPGA development is specially designed to test and monitor what happens in a circuit with the code written or the chip already programmed. These boards are the most popular devices in the cloud. Also, these development boards are now commonly used in the medical industry. These boards are specifically designed for system designers to get acquainted with how to program a processor onboard. Also, they help to test and develop projects efficiently and effectively.
Development boards are highly preferred to bare microcontrollers. Also, these boards are handy when you need to test and debug your project to its full potential. Development boards are primarily built for learning purposes most times. Also, they are ideal for use in industrial applications. There are several custom development boards available in the electronics industry.
Also, development boards are ideal for debugging and testing purposes. These days, development boards feature their development kits that are well documented. Therefore, coding on the onboard microcontroller is quite simple. Also, the FPGA development board is a semiconductor with a blank state. Therefore, you need to program this blank semiconductor chip to do something.
You can program the board to function exactly as a graphics processing unit or a microprocessor. However, these devices are widely used in industries that have no dedicated processors for certain tasks. FPGA development boards are very easy to program. Also, you can change this programming. This makes these boards very flexible.
The development board features reprogrammable gates that function as memory. You can reprogram this memory to carry out some instructions. Also, the logical element is the basic unit of an FPGA development board. These elements can connect to each other to create execution units.
Applications of Xilinx Development Boards
Prototyping
Prototyping is an integral aspect of hardware development. Sensors require custom processors to function properly. However, it is not ideal to design a dedicated processor until you can verify the functionality of a device. Therefore, Xilinx FPGA development boards can take the place of dedicated processors. Xilinx development boards feature peripherals. Also, this implies that you can get an easy-to-integrate package medical device manufacturer can work on.
Instrumentation
These days, smart devices are now widely produced. Smart devices can monitor your heart rate and even oxygenation levels of blood in the body. These devices require processing technology to execute calculations on that data. Xilinx development boards have replaced dedicated processors. It allows electronic manufacturers to design devices that won’t be possible with traditional processing technology.
Defense and aerospace
Xilinx development boards are popularly used in military applications. These boards are widely used in developing machines that detect threats. Xilinx development boards are programmable digital processors with several gates that enable system designers to program devices for security.
Consumer electronics
Consumer electronics require development boards for great functionality. Also, these devices feature advanced processing, making them ideal for digital video applications. In addition, these boards are ideal for high-end video and image processing. Xilinx development boards are suitable for use in measurement systems and computing applications that require processing huge amounts of data.
Features of Xilinx Development Board
The Xilinx development board has a lot of features and characteristics. It is important to know how these features work.
Peripherals
This is the most crucial feature of a development board. Also, the type of peripherals your board features depend on the requirement of your project. Examples of peripherals are USB ports, switches, push buttons, and more.
Memory
There are various memory interface options for development boards. These options include SRAM and SDRAM. Also, there are other onboard memory interfaces like DDR3/4/5, DDR2, and LPDDR. The memory interface type you choose depends on the purpose of the chip.
I/O ports
Expansion or connection I/O ports enable the expansion of module. It is suitable to use standard connectors that are available to expand modules later.
Benefits of Xilinx Development Board
There are several advantages of using the Xilinx development board.
Performance and efficiency
Xilinx development boards feature acceleration and offload functions for CPU. This can help to improve the functionality of your system. In addition, FPGAs are ideal for running parallel execution. Also, these development boards are efficient as they can process many input channels of data or regulate several channels. For instance, you can read 2 sensors at the same time data are transmitted.
Flexibility
FPGA development boards feature a flexible reconfigurable computing function which enables users to change and reprogram the device to integrate the logic function.
Security
There is a minimized risk for malicious modifications during programming. Also, the FPGA development board provides different security solutions to users.
Ease of use
If you are a beginner, you will find Xilinx development board user friendly. Also, most modern FPGA development boards can be complex and confusing to use. Nothing beats going for a development board that is user friendly.
Features to Consider When Choosing Xilinx Development Boards
There are several Xilinx development boards available. While some boards are ideal for an application, some aren’t. Therefore, it is important to consider certain factors when choosing Xilinx development boards. These factors include:
- Device speed grade
- I/O pin counts
- Operating temperature
- On-chip RAM size
- Package size
- Number of multiplier blocks/ DSPs
- Input/output (I/O) interfaces
- Device density
- Hardware description language (HDL)
Conclusion
Xilinx development boards play an integral part in several applications. Also, these boards center on an FPGA. Therefore, they enable designers to test their FPGA code. The Xilinx development board is ideal for both beginners and experts. Also, development boards are versatile as a result of their programmable nature.