Computer Laboratory

Course pages 2015–16

The Terasic tPad Development and Education Board

The tPad is an Altera DE2-115 demo board with a touchscreen LCD and low resolution camera attached to the one of the general purpose I/O ports. The Altera DE2-115 contains a Cyclone IV FPGA in addition to various types of I/O.

Looking at the back of the tPad oriented with the camera at the top-right many ports can be seen towards the top, with chips implementing associated logic. Included 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 there are arrays of 7 segment LEDs, green LEDs, red LEDs, switches and push buttons. The other chips on the bottom half are two SDRAMs, an SRAM and some flash memory.

This board does not include a dedicated processor. Instead, you will be making use of two soft-processors: the first is the NIOS-II, which is a standard Altera component; the second is the TTC ([Chuck] Thacker's Tiny Computer), a tiny but practical processor, which will be introduced during your Computer Architecture lectures.

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

DE2-115 Board (Back)

Block Diagram of the DE2-115 Board