We are extremely proud to announce that we have just started building the first version of the HEXCHOOL-20Q100, a board dedicated to those who want to learn how to design with FPGAs, and that will be provided to students of our FPGAcademy included in the price of the courses.
This board was born in the wake of the success of our HEXBERRY-V board, which was presented at the Maker Faire 2024 held in Rome a few weeks ago. We wanted to provide students with a board that was slightly larger (it does not need to be as small as Hexberry-V) and with a greater presence of interaction peripherals for the students (buttons, leds,..). In addition, 2 PMOD interfaces (12 pins) and also 2 PMOD interfaces (6 pins) have been added, so that students will be able to learn how to design with FPGAs by interacting with any of the PMOD interfaces they want to use for their course/project.
Obviously this board can also be used as EVALUATION BOARD or as DEVELOPMENT BOARD, then delegating to HEXBERRY-V to represent the project in the product or creating a custom board for the purpose.
Like its sister board HEXBERRY-V, we expect that HEXCHOOL will be able to accommodate the 32-bit Efinix VexRisc processor, taking up roughly half of the available FPGA. This will allow our students to learn to design with a SoC as well, using tools like EFINITY and its Eclipse-based Efinity's RISC-V IDE plugin.
Note: these tools are and will always be free for HEXCHOOL, for HEXBERRY-V and for any FPGA coming from EFINIX
The main features of HEXCHOOL board are:
- dim. 80 x 70 mm
- EFINIX TRION T20Q100 Fpga
- 16Mb SPI flash INTERNAL to the FPGA
- external 50 Mhz oscillator
- 5V power supply via USB-C connector (for power only)
- 16 Mbit SPI flash memory (holds up to 2 full bitstreams) INTERNAL to the FPGA
- 4 buttons
- 4 LEDs
- 2 PMOD (12 pins) + 2 PMOD interfaces (6 pins)
- Low voltage supervisor with adjustable reset delay and manual reset
- Microchip cryptographic authentication IC
- USB-C to SPI (active and passive) and JTAG (bridge and direct) programmer on board (does not require an external programmer)
- Native I2C interface
NOTE: We are not affiliated with EFINIX inc. All product names, logos, and brands are property of their respective owners.
All companies, products and services names used in this website are for identification purposes only.
Welcome to Logitiles' FPGAcademy!
We provide courses that aim to teach the designers who will participate a design methodology with FPGA with an industrial approach (placing the student colleagues in front of classic design situations that they will find themselves in the company when they are asked to carry out the system design).
Our teaching material is intended for use with our HEXchool board, which will be delivered to students who have purchased participation in the course, included in the price of the course itself. The material will be provided free of charge to students exclusively in electronic format, including the exercise sources, waveforms and bitstreams ready for use.
We suggest you subscribe to our newsletter to be constantly updated on our news, and prepare to become a member of the LOGITILES FPGAcademy, purchasing your first in-person course on digital design with FPGA.
The first two courses that will be available at the beginning of 2025 will be:
- Advanced Digital Electronics (cod F0.0)
- FPGA technologies (cod. F1.0): an excursus on the types of FPGAs currently existing, with a particular view on the technologies for building FPGAs, which, once known, will be easier to choose the ones that best suit each of us.
In the second half of 2025 we will also add the course:
- VHDL Basic (cod. F2.1): all the main instructions of the VHDL language (version 2008) will be presented with many design examples, with which the classic errors that a non-expert designer makes at the beginning of his career will be shown, and the "tips and tricks" will be provided to design readable, maintainable, reusable code, which will not present surprises in the Place & Route phase. We will illustrate all the steps to write, synthesize, simulate a project, using the EFINIX Tools.
In the next few weeks we will announce the course calendar, the price of each course and any offers for multiple participation. For each course we will announce the list of topics and the duration of each one.
We are preparing to build the new version (0.91) of the HEXBERRY-V board. The debugging phase that we have just finished had highlighted possible improvements that we wanted to introduce in this new release. The final version (1.0) that will go into production is getting closer and closer, and its announcement will not take long.
STAY WITH US as usual...
We have completed the prototyping phase of the new release to present it at the Maker fair in Rome on October 24th. In this version we have replaced the 8 KLE FPGA with a much larger 20 KLE one. This then has the ability to include FLASH memory inside it where the designer can keep his bitstream without the fear that someone can easily take possession of it with sniffing activities, or that it can be corrupted by malicious people with penetration attacks. In addition, we have switched to the use of a USB-C connector with which to supply power to the board. In this release we have also activated the dual programming mode of the FPGA with both JTAG and SPI communication, in order to provide more flexibility to the designer, especially in case he needs to insert the VEXRISC-V processor into the FPGA.
