Macnica develops Japan's first evaluation board "Sulfur" equipped with Altera®'s Agilex™ 5 device

Macnica (Headquarters: Yokohama City, Kanagawa Prefecture, President: Kazumasa Hara, hereinafter referred to as "Macnica") and Kondo Electronics Industry Co., Ltd. (Headquarters: Settsu City, Osaka, President: Kikuo Kondo, hereinafter referred to as "Kondo Electronic Industries") have announced that they have entered into a Macnica technology brand called "Mpression" (Mpression) products. We are pleased to announce today that we have developed Sulfur.

■"Sulfur" - Japan's first SOM evaluation board equipped with Agilex™ 5 FPGA & SoC E series
"Sulfur" is Japan's first evaluation board equipped with Agilex™ 5 FPGA & SoC E series. This platform is ideal for both the development evaluation phase and the mass production design phase, and includes a System On Module (SOM) that can be incorporated into the customer's system and a carrier board equipped with a wide variety of interfaces.
At Macnica, we have been leading the planning and development of "Sulfur" by incorporating customer needs and technical know-how gained from many years of supporting Altera products. Therefore, customers can quickly develop in an environment similar to the actual system, and after developing and verifying with Sulfur, they can seamlessly incorporate SOM into their final products.
Another feature of "Sulfur" is that it can evaluate various cameras and image sensors such as MIPI CSI-2, SLVS-EC, and CameraLink. Since it is equipped with many other interfaces, it is no longer necessary to develop an entire new board for prototyping purposes, and it is possible to significantly reduce board development man-hours and board manufacturing costs during function development.
"Sulfur" can be used for any application that combines the Agilex™ 5 FPGA & SoC E series Arm processor and FPGA fabric, from industrial applications such as machine vision, robot/motor controllers, to AGV/AMR and service robots. This makes it possible to develop and verify algorithms and expand system functionality for a wide range of applications that are needed these days, such as slow mobility, object detection, video surveillance, and autonomous driving assistance.

■Manufacturing using Kondo Electronics' design know-how
Kondo Electronics Industries has previously developed products such as the Mpression brand "Helio ^*" (Cyclone™ V SoC starter kit) and the "KEIm (SOM)" series equipped with Altera🄬 FPGA, which has a high-density and miniaturized design. We are good at
In order to create the optimal quality for the product, the company's manufacturing is carried out in a detailed and planned manner from the specification review stage.In the design stage, layout studies are repeated through collaborative work between circuit design and pattern design, and optimal pin assignments are achieved. We derive the wiring and component placement, take manufacturing constraints into account, and then create wiring quality by making full use of SI/PI simulations of various power supply ICs and digital ICs such as FPGAs, electromagnetic field simulations, EMI rule checks, etc.
This time, "Sulfur" combines the device's features that enable the reduction and simplification of PCB layers with the company's abundant printed circuit board design know-how, and is realized with a through board instead of a build-up board that is disadvantageous in terms of cost and lead time. It is now possible to do so.

■Features
・Equipped with Agilex™ 5 FPGA & SoC E series
-Logic capacity: 656KLE
- Transceiver: 24ch
・Asymmetric multi-core processor
- Two Arm processor Cortex-A55 cores
- Two Arm processor Cortex-A76 cores
・Supports various interfaces/peripherals (details will be explained later)
・Supports both FPGA and processor program code download and debugging
(Connect FPGA download cable to JTAG connector)
- SOM can be evaluated with Sulfur and incorporated into the system as is.

■Shipping time
・Scheduled to start shipping from late April 2024, now accepting reservations

■Mpression Sulfur Photo

■ Mpression Sulfur block diagram

[Click here for product/case details]
https://www.macnica.co.jp/business/semiconductor/macnica_products/boards/144921/

*: “Helio” (Cyclone™ V SoC Starter Kit)
A starter kit equipped with the Cyclone™ V SX SoC developed by Macnica Mpression.
Compatible with Cyclone™ V SX SoC development board.
Click here to learn more about Helio.
https://www.macnica.co.jp/business/semiconductor/macnica_products/121173/

[Click here for product inquiries]
Macnica Kosuke Endo
E-mail: alt-pm@macnica.co.jp

*Company names and product names mentioned in this text are trademarks or registered trademarks of Macnica and each company.
*The information published in the news release (including product price, specifications, etc.) is current as of the date of announcement. Please note that the information may be subject to change without prior notice.