Introduction
The XEM6310 is a compact FPGA board featuring the Xilinx Spartan-6 FPGA and SuperSpeed USB 3.0 connectivity via a USB 3.0 Micro-B receptacle.
Designed as a full-featured integration system, the XEM6310 provides access to over 110 I/O pins on its 484-pin Spartan-6 device and has a 128-MiByte DDR2 SDRAM available to the FPGA. Two SPI Flash devices provide a total of 32 MiB of non-volatile memory, one attached to the USB microcontroller and one attached to the FPGA.
Available with LX45 and LX150 FPGA densities, the XEM6310 is designed for medium- to large-sized FPGA designs with a wide variety of external interface requirements.
Documentation and Reference Materials
The following is a comprehensive list of documentation available for this device.
| XEM6310 User’s Manual | This online documentation space. |
| XEM6310 Pins Reference | The interactive Pins reference for the device provides detailed pinout information as well as automated constraint file generation. Export functionality is provided to PDF, CSV. Constraint files are provided for UCF, XCD (Xilinx) and QSF, SDF (Altera). |
| FrontPanel SDK User’s Manual | The online documentation space for the FrontPanel SDK. |
| FrontPanel API Reference | Online API reference with detailed usage for every API method. |
Functional Block Diagram
FPGA
The XEM6310 is offered in two variants. These two variants are identical except for the FPGA provided. The table below lists some of the differences between the two devices. Please consult the Xilinx documentation for a more thorough comparison.
| FEATURE | XEM6310-LX45 | XEM6310-LX150 |
|---|---|---|
| FPGA | XC6SLX45-2FGG484C | XC6SLX150-2FGG484C |
| Slice Count | 6,822 | 23,038 |
| D Flip Flops | 54,576 | 184,304 |
| Distributed RAM | 401 Kib | 1,355 Kib |
| Block RAM | 2,088 Kib | 4,824 Kib |
| DSP Slices | 58 | 180 |
| Clock Management Tiles | 4 | 6 |
SuperSpeed USB 3.0 Interface
The XEM6310 uses a Cypress CYUSB3014-BZXI FX3 USB microcontroller to make the XEM a USB 3.0 peripheral. As a USB peripheral, the XEM is instantly recognized as a plug and play peripheral on millions of PCs. More importantly, FPGA downloads to the XEM happen quickly, virtual instruments under FrontPanel update quickly, and data transfers are blazingly fast.
On-board Peripherals
The XEM6310 is designed to compactly support a large number of applications with a small number of on-board peripherals. These peripherals are listed below.
Low-Jitter Crystal Oscillator
A fixed-frequency, 100 MHz, low-jitter oscillator is included on-board and outputs LVDS to the FPGA. The Spartan-6 FPGA can produce a wide range of clock frequencies using the on-chip DCM and PLL capabilities.
128-MByte Word-Wide DDR2 Synchronous DRAM
The XEM also includes a 128-MiByte DDR2 SDRAM with a full 16-bit word-wide interface to the FPGA. This SDRAM is attached exclusively to the FPGA and does not share any pins with the expansion connector. The maximum clock rate of the SDRAM is 333 MHz. With the -2 speed grade of the Spartan-6, the maximum clock rate is 312.5 MHz for a supported peak memory bandwidth of 10 Gb/s.
The DDR2 SDRAM is a Micron MT47H64M16HR-3:G (or compatible).
FPGA Flash – 16 MiB Serial Flash Memory
A 128 Mib serial flash device (Numonyx N25Q128A11B1240E or equivalent) provides on-board non-volatile storage for the FPGA. This device is attached directly to the FPGA for use in your design.
System Flash – 16 MiB Serial Flash Memory
A 128 Mib serial flash device (Numonyx N25Q128A11B1240E or equivalent) provides on-board non-volatile storage accessible to the USB microcontroller. This device is used to store device firmware and configuration settings as well as other user assets such as FPGA configuration files or calibration data. Erase, read, and write functions are available at all times (with or without a configured FPGA) through the use of FrontPanel API methods.
LEDs
Eight LEDs and are available for general use as indicators.
FrontPanel Support
The XEM6310 is fully supported by Opal Kelly’s FrontPanel Application. FrontPanel augments the limited peripheral support with a host of PC-based virtual instruments such as LEDs, hex displays, pushbuttons, toggle buttons, and so on. Essentially, this makes your PC a reconfigurable I/O board and adds tremendous value to the XEM6310 as an experimentation or prototyping system.
Programmer’s Interface
In addition to complete support within FrontPanel, the XEM6310 is also fully supported by the FrontPanel SDK, a powerful C++ class library available to Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux programmers allowing you to easily interface your own software to the XEM.
In addition to the C++ library, wrappers have been written for C#, Java, and Python making the API available under those languages as well. Sample wrappers (unsupported) are also provided for Matlab and LabVIEW.
Complete documentation and several sample programs are installed with FrontPanel.
Copyright
Software, documentation, samples, and related materials are Copyright © 2006-2021 Opal Kelly Incorporated.
Opal Kelly Incorporated
Portland, OR
https://www.opalkelly.com
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