ECAD and Architecture Practical Classes

The Terasic tPad Development and Education Board

The Terasic tPad is a combination of a DE2-115 development board from the Altera University Program, a touchscreen LCD and a camera. The DE2-115 board contains an Altera Cyclone IV FPGA in addition to various peripherals and types of I/O.

Looking at the back of the tPad, with the red power button at the top-left, many ports can be seen towards the top, with chips implementing associated logic. Among these is the USB BLASTER, which is used to program the Cyclone IV FPGA located centre-right. To the left of the FPGA is a monochrome LCD.

Along the bottom of the board there are arrays of 7 segment displays, green LEDs, red LEDs, switches and push buttons. The other chips near the bottom of the board are two SDRAMs, an SRAM and some flash memory. At the right is a cable which connects to the touchscreen and camera controller.

There is no dedicated processor on this board. Instead, you will make use of two soft-processors which are synthesised into the FPGA. The first is an Altera NIOS II; the second is a TTC ([Chuck] Thacker's Tiny Computer), a tiny but practical processor. This will be introduced during your Computer Design lectures.

For (a lot of) further details, see the tPad manual and the DE2-115 manual.