People start asking me why this blog had a long hiatus. And here is what's happening

My coworkers and I have spent the better part of the past 5 months developing and fine-tuning PulseRain's latest product: The M10 FPGA board.

We chose to make the M10 board because we need a platform to verify our FP51-1T MCU core. The FP51-1T is an 8051 core that has single clock instruction cycle. It has 4 stage pipeline structure that can reach above 100MHz on Altera Max10 C8 speed grade device. A lot of open source 8051 core claim to be 1T instruction cycle, but they often fall short on FMAX (max clock frequency). Most of them will fold around 50 - 60 MHz for the C8 speed grade.

And for the FPGA platform we are looking for, we would like to see:

*) open source hardware

*) versatile with plenty of peripherals

*) expandable

*) software friendly

*) DFM

We have looked up and down, but couldn't find a perfect match yet. So we decided to go extra miles and do it by ourselves.

And a spy photo of this board can be found here

We original decided on the name Mustang Duino, but later we took some marketing advice and named it PulseRain M10, because:
​

A) It has an Altera MAX 10 FPGA on board. On the record, M is for MAX

B) Internally, we nickname FP51 as Mustang to honor the legendary Mustang Fighter-bomber in World War II. So off the record, M stands for Mustang.:-)


We made the form factor of this board to be Arduino compatible, and we support both 3.3V and 5V IO through jumper setting, so that both 3.3V and 5V shield can be mounted to our board. By itself, the board is 2.1 inch x 3.2 inch.

And the board has an Altera 10M08SAE144C8G FPGA, with onboard peripherals like

*) ADC
*) Temperature Sensing Diode
*) Serial SRAM
*) Voice Codec, (with onboard microphne and speaking plug)
*) MicroSD Card Socket

For more information, please go to m10.pulserain.com

The prototype of the board meets our expectations. And we are currently starting pilot run for production. Stay tuned!

Posted by Changyi at 2:03 PM

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