The Cyclone III Starter Kit

Its been well over a year since my last post on this website and that is because I have been extremely busy and extremely lazy!

Anyway, for a while now I have had a Cyclone III starter kit from Altera Corp., and I want to do some work using it so I though that it would be a good time to restart this blog and document the work here as I go along.

The chief selling point of this kit is that it has a high-speed header that has about 84 user I/O pins. This is great for interfacing custom daughter boards to the kit and experimenting with the Cyclone III FPGA.

The downside of this starter kit is that the user does not have direct access to the USB port. The USB port is primarily there for programming the Cyclone III FPGA and is actually a built-in USB blaster which is good as it provides a free programming pod for the starter kit but not so good for user access.

This is because the USB port does not offer the user high bandwidth serial communications at USB speeds but only at JTAG communication speeds. This is a great shame because what it means is that any high-speed communications that the developer wants to perform on the board must be done through the HSMC mezzanine header which I find annoying.

All high-speed communications with a PC must be done using the HSMC connector and in reality this means adding complexity to the design of your daughter board. If you want a USB port, Ethernet port or any other type of communications port it must be factored in to your daughter board design. It might have been better if a communications port was made available from the very beginning on the starter kit.

That is my only criticism of an otherwise cheap and device rich development board.