Starting in 2025/2206, CPEN211 is giving you the choice to buy a less expensive FPGA board. Please buy only one of the choices below:
The link above will take you to Terasic.com and provide you with the special price indicated. Terasic batches together several orders and ships them in bulk to UBC, who is paying the shipping and customs fees for you. You can pick up your order in the MCLD building.
What's the difference? The DE1-SoC is a more powerful FPGA board, but we don't need all of its features in CPEN211. Also, later courses in CPEN have reduced the need for a more powerful board: CPEN291 no longer exists, CPEN311 uses few DE1-SoC features, CPEN391 uses a different platform, and CPEN412 can adapt. However, the DE1-SoC is still an excellent choice for a hardcore computer engineer committed to learning about hardware.
What features are you giving up? The DE1-SoC has an ARM processor system (previously used in CPEN391), audio I/O (used in some years by CPEN311), and a composite video input (previously used by a few student projects in CPEN391). Also, the CPEN311 labs typically use only 2-3 colours on the VGA output, so the 16 levels of each R, G and B on the DE10-Lite are more than adequate and the 1M colours of the DE1-SoC VGA far exceed what is needed. The DE1-SoC also has about 1.5 times the logic capacity, and the logic may run up to twice as fast. Finally, a few things are missing: USB and Ethernet ports, microSD card slot, PS2 keyboard/mouse port, IR Tx/Rx port, 2 pushbutton switches, a second 40-pin expansion connector, and the 11th LED.
What features are you gaining? The DE10-Lite accepts Arduino UNO R3 expansion boards. It doesn't need an external power supply (USB-A power only). It is also much smaller -- the box is about 1/8th of the volume. At 98x80mm (78cm^2) the board is closer in size to a playing card (89x64mm = 57cm^2) than the enormous DE1-SoC (166x130mm = 216cm^2). Bottom line: it fits far more easily into your backpack!
You will be building your own RISC-V processor system on the DE10-Lite. However, we may also recommend that you buy a small RISC-V board for about $50. Stay tuned for updates.
All students will need access to a powerful laptop or desktop computer.
A computer with an x86-64 processor (Intel or AMD) running an up-to-date version of Windows is strongly recommended. Such computers are provided in the lab for you to use.
Although lab access is provided 24/7, most students will want to use their own laptops/desktops to work on homework in advance of the scheduled lab period. The required software (Altera's Quartus Prime Lite) works best with a large amount of memory (at least 16GB) and large amount of free disk space (at least 80GB free during installation, total 15-30GB after installation).
Please note: Running Linux on an x86-64 computer might also work. While some advanced students have been able to configure their ARM-based macOS computers to run Quartus under Windows, some features may not work (eg, USB programming). Other ARM-based computers (eg, Microsoft Surface, or other ARM-based Linux computers) probably won't work at all. No accommodation will be made or help will be given for using these alternative environments.