Nexys4 DDR (410-292)

Overview

The Nexys4-DDR is a drop-in replacement for our cellular RAM-based Nexys boards. Featuring the same Artix-7™ field programmable gate array (FPGA) from Xilinx, the Nexys4-DDR is a ready-to-use digital circuit development platform designed to bring additional industry applications into the classroom environment. With its large, high-capacity FPGA (Xilinx part number XC7A100T-1CSG324C) and collection of USB, Ethernet, and other ports, the Nexys4-DDR can host designs ranging from introductory combinational circuits to powerful embedded processors. Several built-in peripherals, including an accelerometer, a temperature sensor, MEMs digital microphone, speaker amplifier and plenty of I/O devices allow the Nexys4-DDR to be used for a wide range of designs without needing any other components. The most notable improvement is the replacement of the 16 MiB CellularRAM with a 128 MiB DDR2 SDRAM memory. Digilent will provide a VHDL reference module that wraps the complexity of a DDR2 controller and is backwards compatible with the asynchronous SRAM interface of the CellularRAM, with certain limitations.

The Artix-7 FPGA is optimized for high performance logic, and offers more capacity, higher performance, and more resources than earlier designs.

Artix-7 100T features include:

• 15,850 logic slices, each with four 6-input LUTs and 8 flip-flops
• 4,860 Kbits of fast block RAM
• Six clock management tiles, each with phase-locked loop (PLL)
• 240 DSP slices
• Internal clock speeds exceeding 450MHz
• On-chip analog-to-digital converter (XADC)

The Nexys4 DDR also offers an improved collection of ports and peripherals, including:

• 16 user switches
• USB-UART Bridge
• 12-bit VGA output
• 3-axis accelerometer
• 128MiB DDR2
• Pmod for XADC signals
• 16 user LEDs
• Two tri-color LEDs
• PWM audio output
• Temperature sensor
• Serial Flash
• Digilent USB-JTAG port for FPGA programming and communication
• Two 4-digit 7-segment displays
• Micro SD card connector
• PDM microphone
• 10/100 Ethernet PHY
• Four Pmod ports
• USB HID Host for mice, keyboards and memory sticks

The Nexys4-DDR is compatible with Xilinx’s new high-performance Vivado® Design Suite as well as the ISE® toolset, which includes ChipScope™ and EDK. Xilinx offers free WebPACK™ versions of these toolsets, so designs can be implemented at no additional cost.

Note: The Nexys4-DDR is not supported by the Digilent Adept Utility.

Download

• Nexys4-DDR schematic
• Nexys4-DDR reference manual
• Nexys 4 DDR Webpage