We are pleased to an­nounce that Nios II ker­nel will be avail­able in ker­nel v3.19. Both the Nios II and SoCFPGA are up­stream.

Embest Tech­nol­o­gy has an­nounced the launch of the Lark Board, a full-fea­tured eval­u­a­tion board based on Al­tera's Cy­clone-V SoC. The Lark Board is de­signed for de­vel­op­ment of high-vol­ume ap­pli­ca­tions in­clud­ing au­to­mo­tive, med­ical equip­ment, video sur­veil­lance and in­dus­tri­al con­trol.

The Lark Board fea­tures a 5CSXFC6D6 SoC FPGA, the largest SoC de­vice in the Cy­clone-V SX fam­i­ly. This de­vice in­te­grates a FPGA and ARM-based dual-core Hard Pro­ces­sor Sys­tem (HPS) that op­er­ates at speeds up to 800 MHz and is cou­pled to­geth­er through an AXI high-speed in­ter­con­nect back­bone to the FPGA fab­ric. A sin­gle mono­lith­ic de­vice com­bines the per­for­mance and pow­er sav­ings of hard in­tel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty with the flex­i­bil­i­ty of pro­gram­ma­ble log­ic.

With an abun­dance of free soft­ware re­sources the Lark Board is ide­al for en­gi­neers who want to uti­lize the strengths of the high-per­for­mance Cy­clone V FPGA with the ben­e­fits of dual-core ARM Cor­tex-A9 proces­sors in­te­grat­ed in a sin­gle pack­age, re­duc­ing over­all sys­tem cost and pow­er.

The Lark Board pro­vides 1GB DDR3 SDRAM to each of the HPS and FPGA as well as 4GB eMMC Flash and a Trans­flash card slot for mass stor­age. The Lark Board fea­tures sev­er­al stan­dard I/O in­ter­faces in­clud­ing PCI Ex­press, Gi­ga­bit Eth­er­net, HDMI, VGA, 24-bit LCD, a 12-bit cam­era in­ter­face, USB2.0 Host ports, UART, JTAG, and 3G SDI. The Lark Board uses an Al­tera En­piri­on pow­er so­lu­tion to pro­vide a sta­ble and ef­fi­cient out­put for all the Cy­clone V SoC's pow­er rails.

A USB Blaster II has been in­te­grat­ed on the Lark Board to in­crease the ef­fi­cien­cy of FPGA de­bug­ging. The on­board USB Blaster sup­ports Quar­tus II and ARM DS-5 de­vel­op­ment en­vi­ron­ments. The Lark Board comes pre-in­stalled an em­bed­ded dis­tri­b­u­tion of Lin­ux built us­ing Yoc­to Pro­ject. Other Lin­ux dis­tri­b­u­tions will be avail­able to down­load on­line.