Dev Board Aims at Raspberry Pi, Arduino with Hybrid ARM/FPGA SoC

A Bay-area startup looks to shake up the dev board world with a (really) low-cost, crowdfunded kit designed to outperform competitive boards while undercutting their pricing.

Krtkl (pronounced "critical"), a Bay-area startup, looks to shake up the dev board world with Snickerdoodle -- a (really) low-cost, crowd-funded kit designed to outperform competitive boards while undercutting their pricing.

Based on the Xilinx Zynq-7000 All Programmable SoC, the 50.8mm x 88.9mm Snickerdoodle board also offers WiFi and Bluetooth 4.0 connectivity as well as 154 I/O lines -- 100 of them customizable (Figure 1).

Figure 1. The Snickerdoodle board combines the Xilinx Zynq-7000 hybrid SoC (ARM Cortex-A9 core plus FPGA fabric) with TI WiLink 8 wireless connectivity and extensive I/O. (Source: Krtkl)

 

Krtkl plans to offer the Snickerdoodle starting in March 2016 in two versions -- a base version built around the Xilinx Zynq 7010 and an upgraded version built around the Zynq 7020 (Table 1). Along with wireless and general-purpose I/O, the board will include 2x Gb Ethernet, antenna, switches, ADC, LEDs -- and even secure crypto key storage.

Table 1. Base and upgraded versions of Snickerdoodle. (Source: Krtkl)

What's amazing is that all this can be had for $55 (plus $5 shipping) for the base version or $155 for an upgraded version. This certainly isn't the only cheap FPGA eval board: For example, the $25 Cypress PSoC4 Pioneer Kit is designed to work with Arduino shields and Digilent Pmod daughter cards -- and the PSoC4 is also a hybrid device that combines an ARM Cortex-M0 with customizable analog and digital fabric. As with the Cypress Pioneer Kit, however, most alternatives you'll find are true eval kits intended to let you gain experience with the featured FPGA or MCU.