This reference design showcases the use of Altium Designer as a professional electronic product development platform – being used to design and develop the entire NanoBoard family of products, including the supporting Daughter boards and Peripheral boards. The Peripheral boards work together with the Altium NanoBoards and Altium Designer to deliver a complete FPGA design and development environment.
The Peripheral Board PB03 delivers USB, IrDA and Ethernet communications to the FPGA designer.
The reference design also demonstrates the use of Device Sheets, a simple yet effective mechanism for implementing design re-use. Device sheets allow sections of often-used design to be captured and stored as a single schematic, or a set of schematics. Device sheets can be configured as read-only, ensuring that a tested and proven section of circuitry is reproduced exactly each time it is used in a new design. The perennial problem of component designators – how to re-annotate the completed design when a reuse section is read-only – is cleverly managed using a separate annotation process, known as Board Level Annotation. To make the example files portable, the device sheets are stored in a sub-folder for this project. In a customer-environment this would be a network location accessible to all designers.
The PB03 includes the following features:
- 10/100 Fast Ethernet interface
- USB 2.0 High-Speed interface
- IrDA®-compliant interface (offering speeds up to 4Mbps)
- 1-Wire® memory device used to store board ID and related information
- 1-Wire® device socket (3-pin, 1.27mm pitch)
USB 2
The USB2.0 interface is delivered by a Cypress High-Speed USB Interface (CY7C68001-56LFC). The device is designed to work with any external master, enabling the FPGA designer to incorporate USB 2.0 support into their peripheral design. The device has a built-in USB transceiver and Serial Interface Engine (SIE), along with a command decoder for sending and receiving USB data. The controller has four endpoints that share a 4-KB FIFO space for maximum flexibility and throughput, as well as Control Endpoint 0.
IrDA
The IrDA interface is delivered through a Vishay Fast Infrared Transceiver module (TFDU6102). The TFDU6102 is a low–power infrared transceiver module compliant to the latest IrDA physical layer standard for fast infrared data communication, supporting IrDA speeds up to 4.0 Mbit/s (FIR), HP-SIR, Sharp ASK and carrier based remote control modes up to 2 MHz. Integrated within the transceiver module are a photo PIN diode, an infrared emitter (IRED), and a low–power CMOS control IC, providing a total IrDA front–end solution in a single package.
Ethernet
The Ethernet interface is delivered via a Realtek Fast Ethernet Phyceiver (RTL8201CL). The RTL8201CL is a single-port Phyceiver with an MII (Media Independent Interface)/SNI (Serial Network Interface). It implements all 10/100M Ethernet Physical-layer functions including; the Physical Coding Sublayer (PCS), Physical Medium Attachment (PMA), Twisted Pair Physical Medium Dependent Sublayer (TP-PMD), 10Base-Tx Encoder/Decoder and Twisted Pair Media Access Unit (TPMAU). A PECL interface is supported to connect with an external 100Base-FX fiber optical transceiver.
Altium Designer Projects included in this download:
See Also: PB03 USB - IrDA - Ethernet Peripheral Board
