There are a lot of Arduino boards out there, but this one seeks to help cover any gaps in coverage – the idea is to combine the high performance and flexibility of an FPGA with the Arduino’s ease-of-use and small form factor…

Aimed at developing IoT products, the on-board FPGA can be used for high-speed DSP operations for audio and video processing.

To be precise, the Cyclone 10CL016 contains 16K Logic Elements, 504Kbit of embedded RAM and there are 56 18×18 bit HW multipliers for high-speed DSP.

It is also based on the ARM Cortex-M0+ based Microchip SAMD21 MCU (see price comparison below). Network and Internet connections are secured through an ECC508 crypto-chip.

MKR VIDOR 4000 features

Features of the board include: onboard 8 Mbyte SDRAM, 2 Mbyte QSPI Flash (1MB for user applications), Micro HDMI connector, MIPI camera connector, Wifi & BLE powered by U-BLOX NINA W10 Series, the classic MKR interface on which all pins are driven both by the SAMD21 and FPGA and a MiniPCI Express connector with up to 25 user programmable pins.

Arduino states that each pin can toggle at over 150 MHz and can be configured for functions such as UARTs, (Q)SPI, high res/ high freq PWM, quadrature encoder, I2C, I2S, Sigma Delta DAC, etc.

You program it using the standard Arduino Software IDE, common to all Arduino boards.

Cost? You can buy it from the Arduino Store for €49.90. The board is now shipping, says the Arduino team.

Making FPGA accessible to makers

“The MKR Vidor 4000 will finally make FPGA accessible to makers and innovators,” the Arduino co-founder Massimo Banzi told Electronics Weekly back in May.

He said that additions to the Arduino IDE would allow pre-configured FPGA code to be installed, and that a new internet-based development environment would allow drag-and-drop FPGA configuration. “People will not need to know anything about the underlying Verilog,” he said.