Evo M51 Compute Module

Alorium's Evo M51 is an FPGA-enhanced embedded module featuring the Microchip SAMD51 32-bit Arm^® Cortex^®-M4 microcontroller alongside an Intel^® MAX 10 FPGA. The Evo M51 board conforms to the Adafruit Feather specification for primary pinout, connectivity, and features.

Since Evo is designed to be an embeddable module, the primary I/Os are routed to both through-hole vias as well as castellated vias along the edge of the board. Evo also provides an additional 34 digital castellated I/Os. Most of the digital I/O connections on Evo are routed through the FPGA to and from the primary and castellated I/O. This provides the opportunity for developers to immediately capture inputs or drive outputs from the FPGA without requiring direct interaction with the SAMD controller.

The FPGA can be used to implement enhanced functionality that requires accelerated performance, multiple parallel interfaces, or highly deterministic behavior. This may include providing offload engines for the SAMD, pipelines between the SAMD and the board I/O, or functions that are completely contained in the FPGA and isolated from the SAMD altogether.

Evo M51 will support Alorium technology-supplied pre-built FPGA images that target specific application use cases. In addition, designers will again have the option to develop their own custom logic blocks and integrate them into the top-level MAX 10 FPGA design. Out of the box, Evo is programmable with Arduino just like many other boards based upon the SAMD51. So, writing and uploading firmware to the microcontroller is easy and familiar. In addition, Evo was specifically designed to support running CircuitPython - a version of Python created to run on small microcontrollers.