Note: This project is discontinued and is here for historical purposes.

Summary

The Butterfly Flight expands on the Butterfly Light by adding an adapter for "Wings". Wings are a standardized way of adding peripherals to Butterflies to easily extend their capabilities. The Butterfly Flight is the recommended FPGA development board for all levels of development.

To learn more about how the Butterfly Platform modules are used together visit the Products page.

Included Modules

• USB 1.0 Cocoon
• Spartan 3E 1.0 Cocoon
• Spartan 3E Wing Adapter

Specifications

• USB 1.0 Cocoon
  • Three independent power rails at 3.3V, 2.5V, and 1.2V.
  • Power supplied by a power connector or USB.
  • High speed two channel USB connection for JTAG and serial communications implemented with FT2232.
  • JTAG and USB connections are protected by high speed buffers.
  • EEPROM memory to store configuration settings for FT2232 USB chip.
  • Open Source design that includes Schematic and Board layouts in Eagle format.
• Spartan 3E 1.0 Cocoon
  
  • 8MHz oscillator that can be used by Xilinx's DCM to generate any required clock speed.
  • VTQFP-100 footprint that supports Xilinx XC3S250E and XC3S500E parts.
  • Bank 0/1 and 2/3 can be jumpered to support 1.2V, 2.5V, or 3.3V.
  • JTAG, Serial, and power connections are routed to the the top header.
  • Power and GPIO are routed to the side headers.
  • Board can be used with Bread Boards if only the outside row of the side headers is populated.
  • Open Source design that includes Schematic and Board layouts in Eagle format.
• Spartan 3E Wing Adapter
  • 56 bidirectional I/O lines which can be split up as:
    • 1 - 32 Bit Wing or
    • 3 - 16 Bit Wings or
    • 7 - 8 Bit Wings

Limitations

• The Butterfly Flight does not have any ability to retain its application when it is removed from power. Every time the hardware is plugged into the USB port the application needs to be loaded to the hardware. For prototyping or tethered applications this is desirable behavior, for stand alone applications there are  projects in development to address this limitation.

Resources

• Butterfly Loader - A software project to load FPGA bitstreams to the Butterfly Light.
• All resources for FPGA Developers.
  
• Pinouts/UCF for Butterfly Flight
• Purchase the Butterfly Flight

Pictures