ECAD and Architecture Practical Classes

The Altera DE2 Development and Education Board

The DE2 Board is based around an Altera Cyclone II FPGA. Unlike the previous board used in the ECAD labs, this one does not include a processor. Instead, in the 2nd lab, you will be making use of a soft-processor, which will be introduced during your Computer Architecture lectures.

Click on the board to go to an interactive version of it. This first lab will make use of the 7-segments displays, the 4 blue push buttons, and the VGA output. The overall aim is to write a cut-down version of the game Pong in Verilog. Several optional extensions are available for those who have spare time at the end, or who wish to play around with the board a bit more and see what it can do. Full details, see the DE2 user manual (ftp://ftp.altera.com/up/pub/Webdocs/DE2_UserManual.pdf).

The board also has many additional features, such as audio in/out and microphone ports, a serial interface, 2 general-purpose IO headers, 512 Kb of SRAM memory, and 4MB of flash. Details of these and the rest of the components can also be found in the user manual.