Sipeed has launched another FPGA board part of their Tang family with the Tang Mega 138K Pro Dock powered by a GOWIN GW5AST SoC with 138K logic elements as well as an 800 MHz AE350_SOC RISC-V hardcore unit, and featuring a PCIe 3.0 x4 interface, DVI Rx and Tx, two SFP+ cages, a Gigabit Ethernet RJ45 port, and more.
We’ve previously seen companies like AMD (Xilinx) and Microchip produce FPGA SoCs with hard cores such as the Zynq Ultrascale+ family (4x Cortex-A53) or the PolarFire MPSoC (4x 64-bit SiFive U54 RISC-V cores), but it’s the first time I see GOWIN introduce an FPGA + RISC-V SoC, as all the previous parts that came to my attention were FPGA devices.
Sipeed Tang Mega 138K Pro Dock specifications:
- System-on-Module – Sipeed Tang Mega 138K Pro
- SoC FPGA – GOWIN GW5AST-LV138FPG676A with
- 138,240 LUT4
- 1,080 Kb Shadow SRAM (SSRAM)
- 6,120 Kb Block SRAM (BSRAM)
- Number of BSRAM – 340
- 298x DSP slices
- 12x PLLs
- 16x global clocks
- 24x HCLK
- 8x transceivers at 270Mbps to 12.5Gbps
- Hard CPU – 32-bit RISC-V AE350_SOC @ 800 MHz
- System Memory – 1GB DDR3
- Storage – 2x 128Mbit Flash
- Carrier board interface – 3x board-to-board connectors
- Debugging – 8-pin JTAG + UART connector
- Misc – Various keys and LEDs
- Dimensions – 70 x 50 mm
- SoC FPGA – GOWIN GW5AST-LV138FPG676A with
- Storage – MicroSD card slot, EEPROM
- Video Input/Output
- DVI Tx and DVi Rx ports
- LCD connector
- 2x MIPI CSI connector for cameras
- DVP camera connector
- Audio
- Speaker header
- 3.5mm stereo audio jack
- Microphone array connector
- Networking
- 2x SPF+ cages
- Gigabit Ethernet RJ45 port
- USB – 1x USB Type-C “Soft USB” port
- Expansion
- 3x Pmod connectors
- PCIe 3.0 x4 edge connector
- 40-pin GPIO header
- M.2 B-key socket
- Debugging – USB-C port for JTAG and UART
- Misc – Power switch, 1x RGB LED, 6x user LEDs, fan connector
- Power Supply – 12V via DC jack
- Dimensions – 147.1 x 93.2 mm
The board is programmable with the usual Gowin IDE, but the wiki is currently only available in Chinese language with the English translation likely to come a little later. Alternatively, you can access several code samples on GitHub showing how to use the DVI interfaces, LCD interface, camera interfaces, PCIe, SFP+ cages, and so on. There’s nothing that I can find about the RISC-V core on the Sipeed website, but GOWIN provides various developer guides and tools for the AE350_SOC which you can only access after registering to the company’s website.
The Sipeed Tang Mega 138K Pro Dock is available for pre-order for $195 on Aliexpress with a 12V/2A power supply and cables, but there’s a $20 “store coupon” bringing the price down to $175. There’s also an LCD kit for $209, and the Sipeed Tang Mega 138K Pro system-on-module without carrier board is offered for $119 before the $20 discount. Deliveries are scheduled to start at the end of October. You may follow the progress on Twitter/X.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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Why get this when a KV260 board is $250?
If the peripherals(such as the SFPs) are important, then you can just go for a KR260 too.
You can’t get the chip in a KV260 for cheap. With this board, you can get the FPGA chip for $30 or so. Despite a $120 MSRP, the SoM has an estimated BOM cost of $37.
I would love to know where you can get the FPGA for $30
Well, then why isn’t anyone doing a cheap dev kit out of it? Specially for FPGAs, you need a ton of support to get things out of the ground.
Gowin has a history of partnering with Sipeed on their new chips. Given time, you will see more boards, presumably even cheaper.
This hasn’t happened for any of the other Gowin devices as far as I can tell… I have been waiting for years.
Then I guess we will wait for it.
Though as a reminder, there are much cheaper FPGA boards using ones from Altera and Xillinx which are way better supported and they do have cheap Zynq boards and etc.
http://www.joelw.id.au
Of course, those cheap boards are some random chinese manufacturer so the Reference Design and documentation can be lacking, though this is also the same for Sipeed.
At the price of Tang Mega, it’s not competing with those though but competing with Terasic and KV/KR boards/SOM.