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element14 Pty Ltd announces the launch of the Lark Board, a new high-performance
development board based on Altera’s Cyclone V SoC, and designed for development
of high-volume applications including automotive, medical equipment, video
surveillance and industrial control.
Joerg Bertholdt, Director, Embedded Software Marketing and Planning at
Altera explains that the Lark Board offers a full-featured and powerful
development platform for embedded system design and development enabling
developers to efficiently utilise the advantages of Cyclone V SoC architecture,
density and performance.
The Lark Board features a 5CSXFC6D6 SoC FPGA, the largest SoC device in
the Cyclone V SX family integrating an FPGA and ARM-based dual-core Hard
Processor System (HPS) that operates at speeds up to 800 MHz and is coupled to
the FPGA fabric through an AXI high-speed interconnect backbone.
David Shen, Chief Technology Officer of Premier Farnell comments that
the development of the Lark Board highlights Altera’s leadership in
programmable logic solutions and Premier Farnell’s design capabilities in
embedded products. He adds that engineers will appreciate the power, speed and
flexibility provided by the industry-leading SoC development kit at a price
point not normally seen for full-featured FPGA based evaluation boards.
The Lark Board development board provides 1GB DDR3 SDRAM to each of the
HPS and FPGA as well as 4GB eMMC Flash and a Transflash card slot for mass
storage. Key features include several standard I/O interfaces such as PCI
Express, Gigabit Ethernet, USB2.0 host ports, UART, JTAG, and 3G SDI; combination
of HDMI, VGA and LCD screen supporting VGA display up to 1920×1080 and 1080
HDMI digital output to suit video intensive applications; and 30-pin digital
camera connector ideal for surveillance type applications.
The Lark Board development boards also integrate a 12-bit high-speed and
a dual-channel 3.3GHz RF/IF differential amplifier alongside a 12-bit 105MSPS high-accuracy
ADC to enable analogue signal amplification, filtering and sampling. The Lark
Board uses an Altera Enpirion power solution to provide a stable and efficient
output for all of the Cyclone V SoC’s power rails.
A USB Blaster II integrated on the Lark Board to increase the efficiency
of FPGA debugging also supports Quartus II and ARM DS-5 development
environments. The Lark Board comes pre-installed with Yocto, an embedded
distribution of Linux with other Linux distributions available to download
online.
A webinar on ‘Developing Advanced Embedded Systems with Altera Cyclone V
SoC and element14 Lark Board’ will be held on 2 December. Todd Koelling from
Altera and Craig Stiegman from element14 will discuss how the Lark Board’s flexible
architecture allows multiple configuration options and customisable hardware
designs to be implemented.