Newark element14 launches full-featured SoC FPGA Lark Board

CHICAGO, USA: Newark element14 has announced the launch of the Lark Board, a high-performance development board based on Altera’s Cyclone V SoC. The Lark Board is designed for development of high-volume applications including automotive, medical equipment, video surveillance and industrial control.

“The launch of the Lark Board enables developers to efficiently utilize the advantages of Cyclone V SoC architecture, density and performance, offering a full-featured and powerful development platform for embedded system design and development,” said Joerg Bertholdt, director, Embedded Software Marketing and Planning at Altera.

The Lark Board features a 5CSXFC6D6 SoC FPGA, the largest SoC device in the Cyclone V SX family. This device integrates an FPGA and ARM-based dual-core Hard Processor System (HPS) that operates at speeds up to 800 MHz and is coupled together through an AXI high-speed interconnect backbone to the FPGA fabric. A single monolithic device combines the performance and power savings of hard intellectual property with the flexibility of programmable logic.

“We are delighted with the opportunity to develop the Lark Board, which highlights Altera’s leadership in programmable logic solutions and our design capabilities in embedded products,” said David Shen, CTO at Premier Farnell. “Engineers will appreciate the power, speed and flexibility this industry-leading SoC development kit provides at a price point not normally seen for full-featured, FPGA-based evaluation boards.”

The Lark Board provides 1GB DDR3 SDRAM to each of the HPS and FPGA as well as 4GB eMMC Flash and a Transflash card slot for mass storage. The Lark Board features several standard I/O interfaces including PCI Express, Gigabit Ethernet, USB2.0 Host ports, UART, JTAG, and 3G SDI.

The combination of HDMI, VGA and LCD screen support gives the Lark Board a competitive advantage; moreover, it supports VGA display up to 1920x1080 and 1080 HDMI digital output making it ideal for video intensive applications. It also features a 30-pin digital camera connector ideal for surveillance type applications.