Computer Laboratory

Computer Architecture Group

In the Computer Architecture Group we have a number of projects producing components that we have open-sourced.

DE4 Tablet

The DE4 Tablet is a full computer on a Terasic DE4 FPGA board using an Altera Stratix IV FPGA, a touchscreen and up to 8GB RAM. It's fully portable including a battery pack and HDMI output - we can give presentations directly from the FPGA. We've open-sourced the mechanical design and hope to release further components in future.

PCIe to SATA breakout board

This is a small 4-layer PCB intended to connect to a PCI Express card such as an FPGA board. It takes 8 PCI Express lanes and breaks them into SATA connectors (in the physical layer only, not using the SATA protocols). SATA cables are capable of 6Gbps and much cheaper than cabling designed for PCI Express.