Silicon Blue IceMan65 Development board review

Written by Antti Lukats November 06, 2009 Hits: 1690 Favorites

4.5 (2)

This is the main development board offered by Silicon Blue Technologies for their ultra low power ICE65L FPGA's.

I happen to have one of the very first boards (the board has serial nummer 5, from 15 total of the first batch of ver B). Most users have revision D where some problems are fixed, mostly there are 4 LED's on the rev D board (rev B has no user LED at all).

Good: The board is powered from USB or normal 5V power jack (I use USB always). There are plenty of easy to access 6 pin headers compatible to Xilinx/Digilent 6-Pin header pinout. There are several "FX2" hirose connectors, those have also pinout compatible to the layout in Xilinx Spartan 3A kit, so if you have accessories for Spartan boards, they may also be useable with iceman65

Bad: The board has Digilent "embedded" programming solution on board for SPI flash programming (AT90USB82 chip). This solution is very likely to not work at all. I had success only for a very brief moment using the on-board programmer. I suspect this is due to some driver conflict but any number of new installations do not help, if it stops working, you are doomed. Also the on-board solution does not support FPGA slave mode programming at all, so it really needed to actually program the SPI flash, and then press "configure" button.

Fortunatly U2TOOL universal USB Tool from Trioflex does support fast slave mode download, it takes less than 2 seconds to reconfigure the FPGA on iceman65.

iceman65 with U2TOOL for slave mode fast config
Iceman board is powered from USB, U2TOOL is connected with "fly-wires" to the SPI header.

The "dimmed" red LED is FPGA "DONE", saying that FPGA is configured.

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Average user rating from: 2 user(s)

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Overall:

4.5

refreshing

Overall:

5.0

Reviewed by Seth Benton
November 06, 2009

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Nice review. It was refreshing to something about a board not taken from a press release.

Cool Board -- this might be a collector's item one day

Overall:

4.0

Reviewed by Clive Maxfield
November 06, 2009

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Hi Antti -- how cool to have a board with serial number #5 -- of course it's a bit less cool to have one of the first batch of the 'B' boards when you know so many problems will have been fixed in later versions of the board.

What I would be really interested in is hearing about your experiences with the Silicon Blue FPGAs -- are they as good (low-power) as claimed? Cheers -- Max

Written by :

Antti Lukats