March 17, 2011 - Mesa Electronics introduces 7I61 Anything I/O module. The 7I61 has 96 bits of programmable user I/O, a Spartan 6 FPGA, and a USB port for downloading initial configurations either directly to the FPGA or to the on-card Flash EEPROM for stand-alone FPGA configuration. After configuration, the high speed USB port can be used for 7I61 host communication. The 96 I/O bits are available on four 50 pin connectors, 24 bits per connector. The 50 pin connectors have I/O module rack compatible pinouts.
All I/O pins have pull-up resistors and are 5V tolerant. Several I/O interface daughter cards are available for the 7I61. The daughter cards include 4, 6 , and 8 channel analog servo amp. interfaces, 6 channel resolver interface, RS-422/485 interfaces. 2 daughter cards can plug directly onto the 7I61, and a maximum of 4 daughter cards per 7I61 are supported.
Many IO configuration files are provided with the 7I61 including simple remote I/O, smart remote I/O, 4 to 16 axis servo motion control, 4 to 48 axis stepper motor control, multiple channel PWM generator, arbitrary waveform generation, quadrature counters, resolver interface, mutliple timers and more. VHDL source is provided for all configurations. The 7I61 uses a XC6SLX16 or XC6SLX25 Xilinx Spartan6 FPGA. Free development tools for The Spartan6 are available (Xilinx WebPack) from Xilinx’s web site.
Like all Mesa cards , the 7I61 has a 2 year warranty and is available in industrial temperature range (-40C >> +85C) Price of the XC6SLX16 version of the 7I61 in 100s is $165.00.