Dev Board Aims at Raspberry Pi, Arduino with Hybrid ARM/FPGA SoC

A Bay-area startup looks to shake up the dev board world with a (really) low-cost, crowdfunded kit designed to outperform competitive boards while undercutting their pricing.

Krtkl (pronounced "critical"), a Bay-area startup, looks to shake up the dev board world with Snickerdoodle -- a (really) low-cost, crowd-funded kit designed to outperform competitive boards while undercutting their pricing.

Based on the Xilinx Zynq-7000 All Programmable SoC, the 50.8mm x 88.9mm Snickerdoodle board also offers WiFi and Bluetooth 4.0 connectivity as well as 154 I/O lines -- 100 of them customizable (Figure 1).

Figure 1. The Snickerdoodle board combines the Xilinx Zynq-7000 hybrid SoC (ARM Cortex-A9 core plus FPGA fabric) with TI WiLink 8 wireless connectivity and extensive I/O. (Source: Krtkl)

 

Krtkl plans to offer the Snickerdoodle starting in March 2016 in two versions -- a base version built around the Xilinx Zynq 7010 and an upgraded version built around the Zynq 7020 (Table 1). Along with wireless and general-purpose I/O, the board will include 2x Gb Ethernet, antenna, switches, ADC, LEDs -- and even secure crypto key storage.

Table 1. Base and upgraded versions of Snickerdoodle. (Source: Krtkl)

What&/project/share/#39;s amazing is that all this can be had for $55 (plus $5 shipping) for the base version or $155 for an upgraded version. This certainly isn&/project/share/#39;t the only cheap FPGA eval board: For example, the $25 Cypress PSoC4 Pioneer Kit is designed to work with Arduino shields and Digilent Pmod daughter cards -- and the PSoC4 is also a hybrid device that combines an ARM Cortex-M0 with customizable analog and digital fabric. As with the Cypress Pioneer Kit, however, most alternatives you&/project/share/#39;ll find are true eval kits intended to let you gain experience with the featured FPGA or MCU.