ULX3 is designed for the development and testing of digital circuits and systems that can be synthesized in integrated Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) modules.
The new FPGA development board ULX3S is available for download on Github.
The board was designed and manufactured in Croatia as a result of the cooperation between Radiona, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing (FER) of the University of Zagreb and Končar-INEM Company.
The ULX3S, University digital Logic Learning Xtensible board release 3 with SDRAM, is the successor of ULX2S.
The ULX3S is designed for the development and testing of digital circuits and systems that can be synthesized in integrated Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) modules.
It was primarily developed as a teaching tool for mastering the principles of working, analysis and design of digital circuits, but because of its small dimensions and the possibility of connections with external circuits, it can also serve as a broad-spectrum module for installation in complex devices.
“The ULX3S board was designed by Radiona member Davor Jadrijević in response to the needs for a compact, robust and affordable FPGA board equipped with a balanced spectrum of embedded additional components and expansions, while fully covering the requirements of the Digital Logic Course at FER,” a blog post on radiona.org said.
Available under an MIT-style license
The board is completely open-source and its source code is now available on GitHub. The KiCAD 5 design files for the PCB have been released under an MIT-style license.
The description on Github reads: “This is a small (94×51 mm) standalone FPGA board for education, research and general purpose, with a full featured selection of chips which all wanted on a low-cost PCB, but haven’t found on the market. It’s open source and open hardware because if it is good for our development of f32c SOC, it should be also good to other projects.”
The designers claim ULX3S has rich range of chips and connectivity required for many other open source projects: SDRAM, USB, PS/2, SDCARD, HDMI, FLASH, RTC, I2C, OLED, AUDIO, ADC, onboard FM/ASK antenna 88-433.92 MHz and 56 GPIO pins which are all routed as differential pairs and have pinout that is PMOD compatible
