The Nexys-4 board, based on the latest Artix FPGA from Xilinx, brings unprecedented performance to a student-focused FPGA design kit. With its large, high-capacity FPGA, generous external memories, and a collection of USB, Ethernet, and other ports, the Nexys-4 can host designs ranging from introductory combinational circuits to powerful embedded processors. Plus, several built-in peripherals including an accelerometer, temperature sensor, MEMs digital microphone, speaker amplifier and lots of I/O devices means the Nexys-4 can be used for a wide range of designs without needing any other components.
The Nexys4 is a complete, ready-to-use digital circuit development platform based on the Xilinx Artix-7 100T FPGA. The Artix-7 is optimized for high performance logic, and offers 7 times the capacity, higher performance, and more resources as compared to the Nexys3’s Spartan 6 LX16 FPGA. Artix-7 100T features include:
- 15,850 slices each containing four 6-input LUTs and eight flip-flops
- 4,860 Kbits of fast block RAM
- Six clock tiles each containing 1 mixed-mode clock manager (MMCM) and 1 phase-locked loop (PLL)
- 240 DSP slices
- 500MHz+ clock speeds
In addition to the Artix-7 FPGA, the Nexys4 offers an improved collection of peripherals including 16 user switches, 16 user LEDs, 2 4-digit seven-segment displays, an XADC Pmod header for digitizing analog signals, 2 tri-color LEDs, a micro SD card connector, 12-bit VGA output, mono PWM audio output, a PDM microphone, a 3-axis accelerometer, and a temperature sensor. The large FPGA and broad set of peripherals make the Nexys4 board an ideal host for a wide range of digital systems, including embedded processor designs based on Xilinx’s MicroBlaze.
Nexys4 is compatible with Xilinx’s new high-performance Vivado R Design Suite. It is also compatible with the ISE toolset, which includes ChipScope and EDK. Xilinx offers free “Webpack” versions of these toolsets, which means that designs can be implemented in either for no additional cost.
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