A.L.S.E. is more a “Services” company than a “Products” company.

However, we have developed an FPGA-based demonstrator board named “Tornado”.
This board should be available in Oct 2004.

We think this board is extremely handy in many different situations :

1. Need to build rapidly a “demonstrator” or “mock-up” system.
   In this case, designing a custom system (Schematics, PCB, production, test...) is an overkill ad implies long delays and heavy initial funding.
   A ready-to-use FPGA board is ideal, provided that hokking the necessary “peripherals” is easy.
    
2. Need to test some IPs in actual hardware (servo loop algorithm, communication protocol, large data batches processing, audio flows, etc...).
    
3. Custom control system to be produced in low quantities (the French saying is “five legs lamb”) where a custom PCB would be to costly to design and produce.
    
4. Robotics applications.
   The Tornado board includes a lot of cool featrues for such applications, from sensors inputs to servo actuators drivers. Up to four standard Servo motors can be plugged directly.
    
5. Smart Cards applications.
   The compact smart card connector on the board is ideal to conduct simple or very advanced experiments and tests on SmartCard technology.
    
6. Educational use.
   Again, Tornado offers endless possibilities here for easy to set-up labs (UART, PS/2, PWM, Audio, Analog acquisition and filtering, Servo control, SmartCard, microWire, etc...).
   Last but not least : the Design software (Quartus II Web-Edition) is free for any number of seats, and even for the students personal use.
    
7. Hobbyist.
   Tornado can be used and reused indefinitely in so many different situations that it is a great vector for many different applications, with 100x more “processing power” and I/O versatility than microcontroler-based boards. And indeed, the free Design software is a bonus.

Main Tornado characteristics.

• Altera Cyclone 1C6 FPGA (over 6,000 logic FlipFlops),
• USB self-powered, no bulky AC adaptor !
• EPCS1 programming memory so the board can be live at powerup,
• 4 x digits LED display, for simple experiments and direct user feedback,
• Piezo Speaker / Buzzer,
• USB port (usable for configuration download + bi-directional data exchange with a PC),
• 2 x PS/2 ports, can be used also as I²C ports,
• Fast ADC converter,
• 2 x RS232 ports,
• Spare SPI port,
• Compact Smart Card socket,
• 2 x Lines LCD module connector HE10-14 (LCD module not included),
• 2 x Audio analog outputs,
• Push Buttons,
• 4 x Digital Servo connectors,
• LEDs,
• microWire Temperature Sensor.

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