Sipeed has introduced a brand new entry in its Tang household of field-programmable array (FPGA) gadgets, the Tang Primer 25K — with a tiny module sitting in compact service board and boasting help for USB connectivity and classic video games console emulation.
“[The] Tang Primer 25K is a minuscule core board (23×18mm [around 0.91×0.71″]) design based mostly on [the Gowin] GW5A-LV25MG121, accompanied by a 25K Dock base board that exposes all pins (excluding MIPI high-speed pins),” Sipeed says of its newest FGPA board design, dropped at our consideration by Linux Gizmos. “The ultra-small core board dimension might be utilized in any volume-restricted situations.”
The guts of the module is, as Sipeed says, the Gowin Semi GW5A-LV25MG121 FPGA, giving it 23,040 four-input look-up tables (LUTs), 180kb of distributed static RAM (SRAM), 1,008kb of block SRAM (B-SRAM), 28 18×18 multipliers, six phase-locked loops (PLLs), and eight enter/output (IO) banks, plus 64Mb of NOR flash reminiscence on a tiny module with two 60-pin board-to-board connectors beneath.
These connectors are designed to hyperlink as much as the Tang Primer 25K Dock service board, with out which you will discover experimentation troublesome. This breaks out the FPGA’s options to 0.1″ pin headers and three PMOD growth headers — and features a 40-pin general-purpose enter/output (GPIO) header which can be utilized so as to add an elective SDRAM module.
Sipeed’s newest FPGA module is extremely compact, although a service board shall be required for ease of use. (📷: Sipeed)
With this SDRAM module in place, the corporate claims, it is potential to run soft-cores emulating numerous items of classic gaming {hardware} — utilizing the module’s USB connectivity, introduced out to a Kind-A connector at one finish, for a recreation pad.
Sipeed is taking orders for the board on its AliExpress retailer at $19 for the module alone or $29 with the service board; the SDRAM module is an extra $10. Extra info is out there on the Sipeed wiki.