New NanoBoard 3000 smart development board

A smart, cost-effective path to the future

Remember back to the time when you first became impassioned by electronics. Perhaps it was the moment when you opened your first electronics kit, where you discovered electronics design as a hands-on experience, in real time.

The system in a box provided everything you needed delve into the new world of electronics in a low risk and cost-effective way. In today’s world of sophisticated electronic technology, FPGA design is the new frontier, and there’s now an equally low-risk, hands-on way to explore and harness this latest technology – it’s Altium’s new NanoBoard 3000 smart FPGA development board. But unlike that preconfigured electronics kit, the new NanoBoard is a fully flexible, concept to deployment, hardware-software development system.
A 3000-series NanoBoard
- click for a larger view

The NanoBoard 3000, part of Altium's growing family of NanoBoards, is a programmable design environment that’s supplied complete with hardware, software, ready-to-use royalty-free IP, and a dedicated Altium Designer Soft Design license. It provides everything you need to explore FPGAs ‘out of the box’, so you’re not forced to search the web for drivers, peripherals or other software, and then have the hard work of integrating all these elements to make them work together.

Created from the ground up for designing, prototyping and deploying the next generation of sophisticated, connected electronic products, the new NanoBoard 3000 was developed from concept to manufacture by Altium's in-house engineering staff, using Altium Designer. The result is a complete system-level design environment that provides the ultimate low-risk gateway into the world of FPGA embedded design.

The NanoBoard 3000 is a smart, cost effective development board because it connects and works directly with Altium Designer, and is delivered with a 12-month subscription to the new Soft Design license for the summer 09 release of Altium Designer – all for $US395, with later license renewals for as little as the equivalent of $19.95 per month (purchased in 12-month blocks).

Instant prototyping in a box

Working together, the NB3000 and Altium Designer transform your desktop into a complete, interactive electronics design laboratory. Using 'live' engineering inside a programmable physical hardware design space, the system provides hands-on interaction between you and your design during the development process. Unlike conventional electronics design flows, this unified development system eliminates the need to work in simulated environments, allowing you to run software on hardware in real time, right from the start of the design cycle through to final production.

With the NB3000 system you can use, and build on, your existing design skills to construct sophisticated ‘soft’ processor-based systems inside FPGAs, without any prior FPGA expertise.

You work at a high level of design abstraction, without the need for specialist VHDL or Verilog skills, using your present board layout and systems design skills to construct, test and implement FPGA-based embedded systems. The IP libraries and high-level graphical editors in Altium Designer let you to simply add processors, memory controllers, peripheral blocks and software stacks. There’s everything you need to create next-generation, FPGA-hosted embedded systems with off-the-shelf components, without having to write HDL or low level driver code.  

By implementing your system on the NanoBoard 3000, your circuit can be probed, analyzed and debugged interactively using an array of virtual instruments and JTAG-based monitoring features. The implementation is performed within the programmable hardware realm, so you can update the design quickly and as often as you need to, without incurring cost or time penalties, all the while rapidly building your knowledge and equipping yourself with the skills to embrace the new era of FPGA-based ‘soft’ design.

The new NanoBoard 3000 opens up new design possibilities for all electronics designers, including hardware engineers and application software developers – and without the traditional steep learning curve. It provides a complete and affordable product development platform for design, prototyping and even deployment in the field.

You also have the option to deploy your designs in Altium's new NanoBoard 3000 modular enclosures. These are available in a variety of configurations, and let designers go from prototype to commercial product in one step, simply by clipping the NanoBoard 3000 into the deployment enclosure.

The most effective way to learn about and implement new technology is as a hands-on experience. The new NanoBoard 3000 delivers that concept in a radically new, low-risk way – and it’s all in the box, ready to go.

NanoBoard 3000 Modular Enclosures, with boards installed. Click images for a larger view.

The technology

The NanoBoard 3000 provides a fixed user FPGA that is located on the motherboard itself and has provision for the attachment of a single peripheral board. Much of the peripheral resource functionality found on Altium’s Desktop NanoBoard NB2DSK01 is also found on the NanoBoard 3000, along with additional resources of its own – including relays, power PWM drivers and a MIDI interface.

Three variants in the 3000 series are available:

  • NanoBoard 3000XN – Xilinx variant, incorporating a Xilinx Spartan-3AN device as the User FPGA.
  • NanoBoard 3000AL – Altera variant: incorporating an Altera Cyclone IIIdevice as the User FPGA.
  • NanoBoard 3000LC – Lattice variant: incorporating a LatticeECP2 device as the User FPGA.

 

Architectural highlights of the NanoBoard 3000 include:

  • Dual boot system, allowing the board to update its firmware in the field by itself, over a standard USB connection – no parallel port or USB JTAG Adapter required
  • A plug-in system for application-specific peripheral boards that provide additional system flexibility
  • High-quality stereo audio capabilities, including audio CODEC, high-quality speakers and both MIDI and S/PDIF interfaces
  • 4x Relay and Power PWM drivers
  • USBHub, providing for the connection of up to three USBdevices to be attached for use by an FPGA design programmed within the User FPGA
  • Integrated color TFT touch screen that enables dynamic application interaction.

Additionally, a wide variety of FPGA-ready schematic components (ranging from processors to peripheral components and generic logic), and a complete set of tools for development and debugging, are included with Altium Designer.

Licensing

Each 3000-series NanoBoard comes with a 12-month subscription to the Soft Design licensing option of the summer 09 release of Altium Designer. The license is enabled by a one-off activation process via your NB3000 and the Altium licensing portal.

The Soft Design licensing option provides access to functionality within Altium Designer that enables you to quickly start designing FPGA-based embedded systems, including:

  • FPGA design entry in C, C++, OpenBus, Schematic, VHDL and Verilog
  • Embedded software development using the Software Platform Builder
  • VHDL simulation engine, integrated debugger and waveform viewer
  • Support for a range of 32-bit soft processors for use in FPGA design
  • A rich set of royalty-free IP core libraries, including peripherals and user-configurable custom logic
  • Full software development tool chain with libraries and source
  • Programmable FPGA-based instruments – 'virtual' instruments – for hardware debug and deployment
  • Support for importing third-party FPGA IP cores, developing and reusing IP libraries

Licensing notes:

  • The Soft Design license that comes with your NanoBoard does not extend to use of Altium Designer for custom board (PCB) design. However, the license does allow you to view those front-end design files.
  • During the validity of the 12-month license period, you will receive all software updates to Altium Designer (that are enabled within the Soft Design licensing option), including major releases.

More information

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