The Arrow AXE5-Eagle Development Kit

We received one of the first tested boards from the first batch produced by Trenz.

We were able very quickly to test our Aurora 64B/66 IP as well as our GEDEK 10G Ethernet IP. Which both worked nicely, as expected. We also discovered some issues in the board design and it took us some efforts to use the 1G Ethernet ports !

We have also been testing the official Intel Kit (below).

The Intel-Altera Agilex 5 FPGA E-Series 065B Development Kit - Premium

We were quickly excited by this expensive but high-end kit and we have used it to port and validate many of our IPs : Aurora 64B/66, 10GEDEK and JESD204B at this time.

The Intel Agilex 5 kit in action !

You can see the kit in operation in our Article about Aurora 64B/66B on Agilex 5 which comes with a Video.
If you have access to this kit, you can run the demo yourself with the programming file we provide.

The Arrow-Trenz AXE5000 kit

Thanks to our friends at Arrow France, we’ve got our hands on this small board soon after its release. Annoyingly, it has been produced by Trenz (Germany) but it is only sold by Arrow USA, and you’ll have to pay duty fees if you buy it in Europe from Arrow USA. Maybe this has changed, check with your local Arrow agency.

We find that this kit is too small and limited in terms of connectivity and peripherals for the power of the FPGA. The price is quite contained, but you will be very limited in the projects this tiny board can host, if only by the absence of high-speed connectivity.
The CRUVI HS Connector can receive a CRUVI HS module by Trenz, but the list of available modules is also limited.

But for us, this kit was very interesting : we were able to port and test our High Performance HyperRam Controller ! Which runs flawlessly at 200 MHz with the Winbond HyperRam.