Avnet debuts Ultra96-V2 development board that includes features for industrial applications and market reach

Barely a year after introducing its Ultra96 development board, Avnet has released the new Ultra96-V2 to power industrial-grade Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Complete with an updated radio module that enables engineers to extend their reach into new markets, Avnet’s Ultra96-V2 is an ideal platform for smart home, automotive, industrial controls and many other applications.

The Ultra96-V2 enhances the capabilities of the 96Boards community with a range of peripherals and acceleration engines in the programmable logic not available from other offerings. Like its predecessor, the Ultra96-V2 is an Arm-based, Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC development board built on the Linaro 96Boards Consumer Edition (CE) specification.

The 96Boards are open source development platforms that can be used by system software developers for software applications, hardware devices and kernel programming for operating systems.

Engineers can now extend the market reach of their innovations globally with the Ultra96-V2’s new feature – a Wi-Fi / Bluetooth radio module from Microchip that is Agency Certified in more than 75 countries. Wireless options include 802.11b/g/n WiFi and Bluetooth 5 Low Energy support.

Avnet also updated all components on the Ultra96-V2 to allow industrial temperature grade options so that the board can operate in harsh industrial applications. Additional power control and monitoring is also possible with Infineon’s integrated power management ICs (PMICS) designed for tight board space requirements.

“The Ultra96-V2 board offers engineers and makers a very price competitive development platform for rapidly prototyping the next breakthroughs in AI, IoT, robotics and beyond,” said Bryan Fletcher, technical marketing director, Avnet. “Avnet is proud to support the 96Boards initiative by bringing new performance, additional power-savings, and programmable logic advances to this community of Arm experts and enthusiasts.”

“Ultra96-V2 allows the 96Boards community members to explore programmable logic to accelerate software. Software engineers’ C, C++, and OpenCL algorithms can be compiled into the FPGA portion of the Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC to achieve massive parallelism and really high performance,” said Tomas Evensen, CTO of Embedded Software at Xilinx.