Alibaba cloud FPGA: the $200 Kintex UltraScale+

Summary

Introduction#I was recently in the market for a new FPGA to start building my upcoming projects on.Due to the scale of my upcoming projects a Xilinx series 7 UltraScale+ FPGA of the Virtex family would be perfect, but a Kintex series FPGA will be sufficient for early prototyping. Due to not wanting to part ways with the eye watering amounts of money that is required for an Vivado enterprise edition license my choice was effectively narrowed to the FPGA chips available under the WebPack version of Vivado.Xilinx supported boards per Vivado editionUnsurprisingly Xilinx are well aware of how top of the range the Virtex series are, and doesn’t offer any Virtex UltraScale+ chips with the webpack license. That said, they do offer support for two very respectable Kintex UltraScale+ FPGA models, the XCKU3P and the XCKU5P.Xiling product guide, overview for the Kintex UltraScale+ seriesThese two chips are far from being small hobbyist toys, with the smaller XCUK3P already boasting +162K LUTs and 16 GTY transceivers, capable, depending on the physical constraints imposed by the chip packaging of operating at up to 32.75Gb/s.Now that the chip selection has been narrowed down I set out to look for a dev board.My requirements for the board where that it featured :at least 2 SFP+ or 1 QSFP connectora JTAG interfacea PCIe interface at least x8 wideAs to where to get the board from, my options where :Design the board myselfGet the AXKU5 or AXKU3 from AlinxSee what I could unearth on the second hand marketAlthough option 1 could have been very interesting, designing a dev board with both a high speed PCIe and ethernet interface was not the goal of today’s project.As for option 2, Alinx is newer vendor that is still building up its credibility in the west, their technical documentation is a bit sparse, but the feedback seems to be positive with no major issues being reported. Most importantly, Alinx provided very fairly priced development boards in the 900 to 1050 dollar range ( +150$ ...