Chapter 1. Introduction; General Description - Altera Cyclone III FPGA Reference Manual

General
Description
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Altera Corporation
October 2007
This reference manual provides comprehensive information about the
® ®
Altera Cyclone III family of devices and the Cyclone III FPGA starter
board.
®
The Cyclone III starter board provides a hardware platform that offers a
unique opportunity to customize your development environment via
expansion connectors and daughter cards as well as evaluate the feature-
rich, low-power Altera
For more functionality, the starter board can be expanded through
daughter cards connected to the Altera High Speed Mezzanine Card
(HSMC) connector. Altera and development kit partners are creating
HSMC daughter cards that allow you to expand the functionality of the
board.
For the latest information about available HMSC daughter cards, go to
www.altera.com/products/devkits/kit-index.html.
The main features of the Cyclone III starter board are:
■
Low-power consumption Altera Cyclone III EP3C25 chip in a
324-pin FineLine BGA (FBGA) package
■
Expandable through HSMC connector
■
32-Mbyte DDR SDRAM
■
16-Mbyte parallel flash device for configuration and storage
■
1 Mbyte high-speed SSRAM memory
■
Four user push-button switches
■
Four user LEDs
The main advantages of the Cyclone III starter board are:
■
Facilitates a fast and successful FPGA design experience with helpful
example designs and demonstrations.
■
Directly configure and communicate with the Cyclone III device via
the on-board USB-Blaster
■
Active Parallel flash configuration
■
Low power consumption
■
Cost-effective modular design
Reference Manual
1. Introduction
®
Cyclone III device.
circuitry and JTAG header
™
1–1
Preliminary