USB 3.0 to FIFO bridge evaluation boards with FPGA development board interfaces

Alpha Micro has announced availability of four FTDI USB 3.0 SuperSpeed USB-to-FIFO evaluation boards. Using FTDI’s FT600 series of USB 3.0 to FIFO bridge devices the boards are available in different FIFO bus interface and data bit width options. The boards provide a means of bridging from a FIFO bus to a USB 3.0 host and evaluating the FT600/FT601 devices. They are designed to plug into the most popular FPGA development platforms from Altera and Xilinx. The 16-bit UMFT600A and the 32-bit UMFT601A evaluation boards have a high-speed mezzanine card (HSMC) interface, this typically found on Altera FPGA reference design boards. The 16-bit UMFT600X and the 32-bit UMFT601X boards are equipped with a low pin count field-programmable mezzanine card (FMC) most commonly used by Xilinx on their FPGA development boards. The four evaluation boards are fully compliant with USB 3.0 SuperSpeed 5 Gb/s, USB 2.0 High Speed 480 Mb/s and USB 2.0 Full Speed 12 Mb/s standards. They support both the multi-channel FIFO and 245 Synchronous FIFO parallel slave bus protocols and can typically achieve a burst rate of 400Mb/s. Four FIFO in and out channels can be managed in the multi-channel FIFO mode. The UMFT60xx boards support multi voltage I/O of 1.8VDC, 2.5VDC or 3.3VDC. With the increasing need to interface programmable logic devices to USB 3.0-based peripherals the UMFT60xx evaluation boards provide a quick and convenient method of prototyping a design using the FT600 series of bridge devices, says the company.