I am doing an FPGA project with the Sno M2 and Input & Display Carrier Board. The setup is perfect, except I finished my design only to find out that it won’t fit on the Sno FPGA (I’m an FPGA newbie). Now that Alorium has released the Sno Edge 50 which uses the 10M50 chip, rather than the 10M16 that the Sno uses, that would work perfectly. Any chance of getting that on an M2 board? Would it even fit (the 10M16 is 11mm x 11mm and the 10M50 is 17mm x 17mm, while the M2 board is 22mm x 22mm - although there needs to be room for the M2 connector and screw, among other components)?
You can use a PCB design tool (e.g., KiCad, Eagle, Altium) to virtually arrange and interconnect the components.
Check the clearances and routing possibilities.
It won’t fit.
Thank you both. I guess I will have to go outside the MicroMod ecosystem for my project. Such a shame as the Input & Display carrier board is perfect as the end result would be something similar to a GameBoy (if you’re old enough to remember those), with the point of the project being designing a custom CPU and OS for learning purposes.
I have a stupid newbie question. Can the processor board be made bigger to accommodate a larger chip? For example, could it be expanded to the side away from the screw so that it would look like an L? At least on the Input & Display Carrier Board that would not interfere with any components on the board (not sure about other carrier boards as I don’t have any of those).
I know that this isn’t likely to be implemented, just a curiosity for me at this point. I already bought a Cora Z7-07S board with an Adafruit TFT shield and PMods with a joystick and buttons. Not as aesthetically pleasing as the Input & Display carrier board, but it will do the job.
Can the processor board be made bigger to accommodate a larger chip? For example, could it be expanded to the side away from the screw so that it would look like an L?
Yeah, that would work. You’d need to design and assemble your own board but it would work.
As a newbie, that is way over my head. But hopefully SparkFun will see the value in a larger FPGA for the MicroMod ecosystem.
I have been moving ahead with my project on the Cora Z7-07S board, but I do miss how sleek and light the MicroMod Input & Display + Sno M2 configuration is. That got me thinking…the issue is the memory. The Intel Max 10M16 FPGA used by the Sno M2 has 562,176 bits of memory available. The AVR core uses 280,320 or nearly 50% of the total available - and that is just for 32KB program memory and 2KB SRAM and some other bits here and there.
So what about a board that still uses the same FPGA, but has a RAM chip on the other side of the board, similar to the RP2040 processor board? Alorium has an SPI RAM Xcelerator Block that would allow the FPGA to communicate with RAM, so users wouldn’t have to create that themselves.
Is such a product something SparkFun would consider making? Otherwise user designs can have no more than about 34KB of memory, as the existing 32KB program memory and 2KB SRAM are used by the AVR core. It seems that FPGA memory is expensive, but adding an inexpensive memory chip to the board would completely change that.