An audio-application development board for low-cost, low-latency FPGAs with on-chip USB PHY

Posting a little earlier out of sheer excitement, our last interview at Embedded World 2023 was with Gowin Semiconductor, who we have written about previously, but we wanted to see what new low-cost FPGAs they had on show. Funnily enough, it was a case of same device, different board.

In this chat with Danny, we discuss Gowin’s new application-specific board for the LittleBee flash-based FPGAs. This board is designed to challenge the microcontroller-dominated USB audio interface market by utilising the on-chip USB PHY, which eliminates external components, reduces BOM, and results in a more compact end product while retaining up to 32-bit resolution and 768 KHz sample rate for extremely high-definition audio output.

Danny then shows us an example of an end-product USB audio amplifier that uses Gowin’s solution and is remarkably compact and discrete. LittleBee FPGAs are also suitable for home audio recording applications and could be scaled up from stereo to 8- or 16-channel audio as a lower-cost alternative to traditional microcontroller-based interfaces.