Basys 3 Artix-7 FPGA Trainer Board with USB Cable: Recommended for Introductory Users

The Basys 3 is one of the best boards on the market for getting started with FPGA. It is an entry-level development board built around a Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA. As a complete and ready-to use digital circuit development platform, it includes enough switches, LEDs, and other I/O devices to allow a large number of designs to be completed without the need for any additional hardware. There are also enough uncommitted FPGA I/O pins to allow designs to be expanded using Digilent Pmods or other custom boards and circuits, and all of this at a student-friendly price point.

The Basys 3 is designed exclusively for Xilinx's Vivado Design Suite, and the WebPACK edition is available as a free download from Xilinx.

Features

The Artix-7 FPGA is optimized for high performance logic, and offers more capacity, higher performance, and more resources than earlier designs. Artix-7 35T features include:

• Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA: XC7A35T-1CPG236C
• 33,280 logic cells in 5200 slices (each slice contains four 6-input LUTs and 8 flip-flops)
• 1,800 Kbits of fast block RAM
• Five clock management tiles, each with a phase-locked loop (PLL)
• 90 DSP slices
• Internal clock speeds exceeding 450MHz
• On-chip analog-to-digital converter (XADC).

The Basys3 also offers an improved collection of ports and peripherals, including:

• 16 user switches
• 16 user LEDs
• 5 user pushbuttons
• 4-digit 7-segment display
• Three Pmod ports
• Pmod for XADC signals
• 12-bit VGA output
• USB-UART Bridge
• Serial Flash
• Digilent USB-JTAG port for FPGA programming and communication
• USB HID Host for mice, keyboards and memory sticks

Resources & Downloads

Documentation

• Basys 3 Reference Manual (off-site)
• Basys 3 Schematic (off-site)
• Master XDC Files (off-site)
• Xilinx 7 Series FPGAs Overview (off-site)

Tutorials

• Basys 3 Programming Guide (off-site)
• Getting Started with Digilent Pmod IPs (off-site)
• Getting Started with the Vivado IP Integrator (off-site)
• Installing Vivado and Digilent Board Files (off-site)

Example Projects

• Basys 3 Abacus Demo (off-site)
• Basys 3 General I/O Demo (off-site)
• Basys 3 Keyboard Demo (off-site)
• Basys 3 XADC Demo (off-site)
• Use Flip-flops to Build a Clock Divider (off-site)

Additional Resources

• Xilinx Vivado Workshop Materials (off-site)
• 3D CAD file - STP file (.zip)