iCEBreaker-Bitsy FPGA adds the powerful flexibility of an FPGA to your next project in a convenient Teensy form factor. It works out of the box with the newest open-source FPGA development tools and easily integrates into a wide variety of projects.

The iCEBreaker-Bitsy FPGA board is designed to be pinout compatible with the widely popular Teensy microcontroller boards. This gives you access to a library of carrier boards and extensions that can be used for prototyping, gateware and firmware development. Thanks to Teensy to Feather adapter board you can also access the ever growing Adafruit Feather ecosystem.

We also offer a Pmod breakout board for the iCEBreaker-Bitsy that provides access to the large Pmod module collection. You can find a lot of different Pmods in the Digilent online store. For several use cases, we have also developed our own Pmod modules and we keep adding more as they are developed.

While the full size iCEBreaker is a great teaching and learning platform. The iCEBreaker-Bitsy is the next step where you integrate the power of FPGA into your own project. You can either plug it in using pin headers or solder it directly onto your board as a surface mount module.

Integrated Support

The iCEBreaker-Bitsy FPGA boards are already supported by the following FPGA design tools:

• Yosys
• nextpnr
• IceStorm
• Icestudio
• nMigen
• Litex

Icestudio editor screenshot

nextpnr editor screenshot

Features & Specifications

• iCE40UP5k FPGA
  • 5280 Logic Cells (4-LUT + Carry + FF)
  • 128 KBit (16 KB) Dual-Port Block RAM
  • 1 MBit (128 KB) Single-Port RAM
  • PLL, Two SPI and two I2C hard IPs
  • Two internal oscillators (10 kHz and 48 MHz) (for simple designs)
  • 8 DSPs (16x16 multiply + 32-bit accumulate) (for digital signal processing)
  • 3x 24 mA drive and 3x hard IP PWM (for the on board RGB LED)
• QSPI-DDR-capable flash 128 MBit (16 MB)
  • Enables hardware designs that access the flash; by choosing a Quad SPI Double Data Rate flash lets designs to run at very high speeds.
• QSPI Pseudo SRAM 64MBit (8 MB)
  • Provides additional RAM for more memory demanding designs.
• Lots of I/O capable pins
  • On Board RGB LED for status indication
  • Two on-board discrete LEDs
  • One USB-C interface fully controlled from the FPGA (allows the implementation of arbitrary Low and Full Speed USB devices)
  • One on board push button
  • 24 PINs on the edge pads, compatible with breadboards, 24pin IC sockets and SMD soldering
• Built in DFU bootloader for easy programming
  • Natively supported by the dfu-util tool
  • Can be switched into bootloader mode from the user bitstream through either a button press or a DFU stub.

Pinout Diagram

Click to enlarge

Open Source

For more detailed and technical discussion of the hardware features, please visit our iCEBreaker GitHub repository. If you have questions regarding this project, or want to follow project progress in real time, please join our 1BitSquared Discord server.

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