X6500rev03 VccINT

In the last couple weeks, we've been experimenting with different FPGA core voltages (VCCINT). Our measurements have shown that on most rev3 boards, performance can be increased significantly by slightly increasing this voltage. Because of this, all rev3 boards starting today will be shipped with VCCINT set to 1.23V (instead of the original 1.20V). This applies to all boards shipped on or after 3/29/2012.

While this increases the board's power consumption slightly, it also increases the potential limit on clock rate.

 

 

If anyone would like to increase the core voltages on an older board, it simply means swapping two resistors (R2 and R8). You can either attempt this yourself or send it back to us and we'll do the work free of charge. We only ask that you pay the return shipping charge.

X6500 rev02 Interesting Failure

We had a board failure that was interesting and I’d like to bring up. Thanks to Fizzi for these photos.

Here are the pictures.

Essentially the board shorted itself out right under the power jack where the +Ve is close to GND (separated only by a small gap around the pad). I think it was a manufacturing error or a surge/spike of some kind that led to some small arc over and eventually bridged the connection enough that the onboard fuse broke.

A-bit of dremeling later, she’s good to go again. Might be a tad ugly if you ever remove the jack though.

X6500 rev03

Well the boards are in and are shipping at the moment. You can get them through www.cablesaurus.com, who incidentally, is our exclusive reseller for this product.

We’ve had an initial hitch with the ENABLE pins not being pulled up high enough for the onboard Vregs to turn on, we’ve added a dual MOSFET circuit to turn them on and off whenever USB voltage is present, that’s been solved by putting a suitable pullup resistor manually onto each board at the moment. Kudos to Fizzisist for doing all the hard manual work at this point of time before shipping.

Here’s a couple of pictures,

Isn’t she a beauty?