Altera Cyclone III FPGA Starter Board - Manual (Page 5)

Altera Corporation 1–1
April 2012 Preliminary
1. Introduction
General
Description The Cyclone ® III starter board provides a hardware platform that offers a
unique opportunity to customize your development environment via
expansion connectors and daughtercards, as well as evaluate the
feature-rich, low-power Altera
® Cyclone III device.
For more functionality, you can expand the starter board through
daughtercards connected to the Altera
® High Speed Mezzanine Card
(HSMC) connector.
f
For the latest information about available HMSC daughtercards, go to
www.altera.com/products/devkits/kit-index.html .
The main features of the Cyclone III starter board are:
■ Low-power consumption Altera Cyclone III EP3C25 chip in a
324-pin FineLine BGA (FBGA) package
■ Expandable through HSMC connector
■ 32-megabyte (MB) DDR SDRAM
■ 16-MB parallel flash device for configuration and storage
■ 1-MB high-speed SSRAM memory
■ Four user push-button switches
■ Four user LEDs
The main advantages of the Cyclone III starter board are:
■ Facilitates a fast and successful FPGA design experience with
example designs and demonstrations.
■ Directly configure and communicate with the Cyclone III device via
the on-board USB-Blaster
™ circuitry and JTAG header
■ Active parallel flash configuration
■ Low power consumption
■ Cost-effective modular design