Digilent Academic Program targets Electrical and Computer Engineering programs across the world. The program enables universities to gain access to the latest technologies from Digilent and our technology partners.
In the academic world, the current pandemic has manifested as an unplanned pivot to remote learning. We know that switching to remote teaching can add a financial weight, so if you are an educator or a student experiencing this shift, we’d like to help you with educational tools and curriculum. Today we want to introduce you to one of the most complete development boards from the Digilent portfolio, the Basys 3.
The Basys 3 board is a complete, ready-to-use digital circuit development platform based on the latest Artix-7™ Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) from Xilinx. With its high-capacity FPGA, low overall cost, and collection of USB, VGA, and other ports, the Basys3 can host designs ranging from introductory combinational circuits to complex sequential circuits like embedded processors and controllers. It includes enough switches, LEDs, and other I/O devices to allow a large number of designs to be completed without the need for any additional hardware, and enough uncommitted FPGA I/O pins to allow designs to be expanded using Digilent Pmods or other custom boards and circuits.
- Features the Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA: XC7A35T-1CPG236C
- 33,280 logic cells in 5200 slices (each slice contains four 6-input LUTs and 8 flip-flops)
- 1,800 Kbits of fast block RAM
- Five clock management tiles, each with a phase-locked loop (PLL)
- 90 DSP slices
- Internal clock speeds exceeding 450 MHz
- On-chip analogue-to-digital converter (XADC)
- Digilent USB-JTAG port for FPGA programming and communication
- Serial Flash
- USB-UART Bridge
- 12-bit VGA output
- USB HID Host for mice, keyboards and memory sticks
- 16 user switches
- 16 user LEDs
- 5 user pushbuttons
- 4-digit 7-segment display
- 4 Pmod ports: 3 Standard 12-pin Pmod ports, 1 dual-purpose XADC signal / standard Pmod port
Learning Resources for Digital Logic Circuits
Students can learn the fundamentals of digital logic circuits and logic design through the Digilent learn site.
- XOR and XNOR– Teaches the OR (or XOR) and XNOR functions, gates, and controlled inverters.
- Logic Minimization– Presents truth tables, K-maps, and Minterm SOP equations to provide the best mechanism for visualizing and minimizing the input-output relationships of digital logic circuits.
- Subtractors– Teaches about ripple borrow subtractors and adders for combinational logic circuits.
- Flip-flops– Presents the circuit that has two stable states and can be used to store state information. The Flip-Flops is the simplest and most useful edge-triggered memory device.
- Verilog HDL Background and History– Introduction into Hardware Description Language and a brief history from the time it was invented.
- Verilog HDL: The First Example– Presents Modules, I/O Ports, Buses, and Assigns with examples of each functionality.
