Mercury FPGA Module

Mercury is a powerful FPGA module packed onto a breadboard-friendly 64-pin DIP package.

Features

  • Xilinx Spartan-3A FPGA with 200,000 equivalent logic gates
    (XC3S200A-4VQG100C)
  • 50MHz precision crystal oscillator
  • 1A 1.2V and 3.3V voltage regulators
  • USB and JTAG programming
  • Memory
    • 288 Kb internal block RAM
    • 4 Mb Cypress SRAM (512k x 8bit, 10ns access time)
    • 2 Mb SPI Flash (1.2Mb for bitstream, 800Kb for user data)
  • Input/Output Pins
    • 30 GPIO pins with 5V tolerance and short-circuit protection
    • 8 analog input pins (MCP3008: 200 Ksps, 10 bit ADC)
    • 9 direct (high-speed) GPIO pins
    • 4 LEDs with GPIO pins
    • 4 input-only pins
    • 1 user switch, 1 reset switch

Easy-to-use DIP package

Mercury makes it easy to use an FPGA on a breadboard, or embedded into a small project. It takes care of the 1.2V and 3.3V regulators, bypass capacitors and configuration circuitry necessary for operation of the FPGA. No tiny components to solder. No proprietary cables to fuss with. Right out of the box, Mercury is ready to go!

5V analog and digital support

Mercury is equipped with a 8-channel, 10-bit, 200-Ksps analog-to-digital converter, with externally configurable dynamic range. This is perfect for interfacing analog sensors, or for audio input. It also has 30 pins of 5V tolerant GPIO, so you can safely interface TTL-level devices with the 3.3V Spartan-3A FPGA.

Mercury block diagram

High-performance configurable logic

FPGAs, or field-programmable gate arrays, are amazing devices! They are digital blank-slates with which you can implement almost any kind of digital circuit you can imagine! This offers a great deal of power and flexibility. For example, FPGAs can implement special-purpose processors (for a specific task like signal processing, or encryption) that are orders of magniude faster than a traditional processor.  Mercury is equipped with a Xilinx Spartan-3A FPGA containing 200,000 equivalent logic gates. A 50MHz system clock is provided, and faster clocks can be synthesized using Digital Clock Managers (DCMs) available on the Spartan-3A. For working memory, 288Kbits of internal block RAM are avaiable, along with 4096Kbits of external RAM, provided by a Cypress SRAM with fast 10ns access time. A 2Mbit Flash chip stores the FPGA configuration bitstream, with 800Kbits of this free for user data.