Development platforms added to Future-Blox range

Future-Blox Baseboards and Micro-Blox Daughtercards are designed to offer a system hardware blueprint for a variety of end products.

Future Electronics' board designs can be copied or modified by users at will and so help to accelerate the process of developing proofs of concept and early prototypes.

The ProASIC3 Micro-Blox and Igloo Micro-Blox boards both offer system-level functions, including power management, external Flash and pSRAM memory and an RS-232 interface.

The ProASIC3 board carries an M1A3P1000-FGG484 FPGA and the Igloo board an M1AGL1000V2-FGG484.

Both devices feature a Cortex M1 Processor core, have 1,000,000 gates and are pin compatible.

Both Micro-Blox boards include a variety of extra features to facilitate rapid hardware development, including: programming/debugging circuit interfacing to USB support for the Libero integrated development environment VHDL implementations of key functions such as real-time clock and watchdog, memory controller, support for ARM Cortex-M1 core, encryption, memory card controller, SPI, I2C and PWM modules, and LCD controller.

Both of the Micro-Blox boards, although capable of stand alone operation, can connect to the Future-Blox Longbow baseboard.

This provides additional I/Os and functions such as RS-485 and CAN2.0B interfaces, USB ports, interfaces for Bluetooth, Zigbee and WiLAN modules, 10/100 Ethernet port, audio codec and Class-D amplifier, direct interface to LCDs ranging from 3.5 to 12.1in, and an LCD touchscreen controller.

The 160-pin header on the Micro-Blox daughter boards also allows for board-to-ribbon connection to user systems.