A few months ago I wrote about FireAnt low-cost FPGA development board powered by Efinix Trion T8 FPGA, and it was the first time I personally heard about the company.

Trion FPGA family range from the T4 with 3,888 logic elements up to the Trion T200 with 192,000 LE’s. A board more powerful than FireAnt, but not quite high-end, recently showed up on Digikey with Trion T20 BGA256 development kit going for $150.

Trion T20 BGA256 Development Kit specifications:

FPGA – Efinix Trion T20 FPGA with 19,728 LE’s, 1,044 Kbit embedded RAM, 36 18×18 multipliers, 7 PPL’s, up to 220 GPIO’s; 256-ball FBGA (13×13 mm)

System Memory – 256 Mbit SDR SDRAM

Storage – NOR flash

USB – 1x Micro-USB port for programming

Debug / Configuration – SPI and JTAG headers to facilitate configuration

Expansion 3x I/O headers to connect to external devices LVDS TX header, LVDS RX & clock header

Misc – 8x user LED’s, 3x user push-buttons, 3x user DIP switches, 50 and 74.25 MHz oscillators

Power Supply – 5VDC via power barrel jack

Dimensions – N/A

The Trion T20 BGA256 development kit includes a Trion T20 BGA256 development board, a USB cable, four standoffs, and four screws. Applications include prototyping for I/O expansion, control plane, processing/coprocessing, IoT, industrial, medical computing, and acceleration and deep learning in edge devices among others.

The company explains their Trion development kit uses the Efinix Efinity software which provides a complete tool flow from RTL design to bitstream generation, including synthesis, place-and-route, and timing analysis. It comes with a GUI, but there’s also support for the command line, and the software supports both Verilog HDL and VHDL languages.

But while looking for information about the board on the net, I discovered “PulseRain Reindeer for Efinix Trion T20 BGA256 Development Kit” on Github. PulseRain Reindeer is a soft CPU of Von Neumann architecture leveraging RISC-V RV32I[M] instruction set, and featuring a 2 x 2 pipeline. Configuration tested on Trion T20:

RV32I processor core, Von Neumann Architecture

48KB Block RAM for code and data

1x UART TX

32-bit GPIO

To make development easier, an Arduino board support package has also been provided on GitHub so that developers can write code for RISC-V directly in the Arduino IDE.

More details about the development kit and Trion T20 FPGA can be found on the product page.