Archive for February, 2010

Cyclone II Voltage Regulators

I decided to interrupt my Cyclone II Handbook dissection series in order to build the voltage regulators needed for the Saturn Project. The EP2C8 Cyclone II FPGA we have on our breakout board requires nine voltage supplies: Voltage Supply Name Description Voltage Level VCCINT These are internal logic array voltage supply pins. VCCINT also supplies [ READ MORE ]

Dissecting the Altera Cyclone II Handbook – Part 2

Welcome back to the second part of the series dissecting the Altera Cyclone II Handbook. I’m ripping out all of the important information you need to know from the 470 page tome, and condensing it down to a couple of blog posts. This week I’m going to take a look at the clocks and PLL [ READ MORE ]

Dissecting the Altera Cyclone II Handbook – Part 1

The Cyclone II Handbook, Volume 1 has 470 pages. There is a ton of great information in that document, but in an effort to make it more digestible, I’m going to try to break it apart and present some of the more vital information it contains. The Handbook is a general guide to the full [ READ MORE ]

Introducing: The Saturn Project

I’ve always been amazed at the power and most importantly the flexibility of an FPGA (Field-Programmable gate array). I first learned about the FPGA after spending uncountable hours connecting jumper wires between several 74xx series IC’s in my undergrad digital logic course. One giant pile of reconfigurable logic. Brilliant! Goodbye hours of tedious, mind-numbing wire [ READ MORE ]