Recently I purchased a Sipeed TANG PriMER development board featuring an Anlogic EG4S20 FPGA (codenamed Eagle S20). The only reason I bought the board was to see what Anlogic FPGAs are capable of, since I had never heard of that FPGA vendor before. No need to think twice when the board costs less than 20$.
The TANG PriMER board is officially marketed as a RISC-V development board and comes with a Hummingbird E200 RISC-V softcore design preloaded into the onboard configuration flash. The Hummingbird is basically a slightly modified variation of the SiFive E2 core.
Setting up the tool chain was a bit of a hustle until I found this site which hosts both the TD IDE and the required license files. There are also some datasheets and schematics. Most of the official documentation is only available in Chinese, therefor I strongly recommend the inofficial english translation.
I have not done a lot with this board yet but verify the tool chain with a simple blink LED example. The design included a 32 bit counter which resulted in an estimated maximum frequency of 252 MHz. Not too bad. The TD IDE also comes with an IP wizard to generate IP cores, but it seems to just generate a wrapper for some primitive instantiations. It’s worth mentioning that the EG4S20 has an on-chip oscillator (250 or 266 MHz, documentation and IDE do not agree), on-chip SDRAM (64Mbit) and an 8-channel ADC (1MHz sample rate). Still need to figure out how to configure the board and which programmer can be used.
Since Anlogic FPGAs are not listed on digikey.com or other distributor websites, it seems unlikely they will become widely available outside of China anytime soon.
Leave a Reply