Product category:
Programmable Logic Devices
News Release from: Actel Europe | Subject: A42MX09
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 12 February 2003
FPGAs improve reliability for NC
machines
Electronic Control Systems has adopted Actel's A42MX09 antifuse field-programmable gate array device for its new numerical controllers targeted at machine tool manufacturers.
Electronic Control Systems (ECS) has adopted Actel's A42MX09 antifuse field-programmable gate array (FPGA) device for its new numerical controllers targeted at machine tool manufacturers Actel's MX devices were chosen for their price/performance, flexibility and design security
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 5 Aug 2008 at 8.00am (UK)
Related stories
Development environment helps cut power
Enhancements enable easy comparisons of multiple design scenarios and their resulting power consumption and battery life implications.
Plug-in cards speed specific FPGA designs
HMI and miniature motor control daughtercards enable designers to shave months off of their design time and easily meet the most stringent power budgets.
Unlike SRAM-based FPGAs that are vulnerable to electrical noise, the A42MX09 solution also provides rugged and reliable operation in harsh industrial environments.
"Our customer requirements vary widely and we are often asked to deliver special configurations in very short timescales.
The Actel MX device enables us to quickly meet these customer needs while ensuring that our solutions are reliable, secure, high speed and cost effective", said Fernando Vannini of the Hardware Research and Development Department at ECS.
Further reading
FPGA family promises more for less
Low-power field-programmable gate arrays claim the industry's best power-, area-, logic- and feature-per-I/O ratios in a programmable device.
Programmable devices add ADC calibration
Fusion PSC calibration intellectual property eliminates the additional discrete ADCs and prescalers often required to achieve higher levels of accuracy.
"The machine tool industry is highly competitive; therefore, the adoption of Actel devices allows us to protect and support our position".
"In addition to the reliability, low power and inherent security features of the antifuse architecture, Actel's MX FPGA family is the leading price/performance solution in its category", said Jon Ewald, Director of Product Marketing at Actel.
"ECS's numerical controllers are a great illustration of the capabilities the MX family can deliver for a wide range of consumer, industrial and high-reliability applications".
As mask costs continue to skyrocket, cost-effective, user-programmable FPGAs offer a highly attractive alternative to ASICs for implementing complex design functions.
More often than not, the key intellectual property, which differentiates the system from competitive offerings, is housed in programmable logic.
Given these trends, the vulnerability of each system's unique value-added characteristics is now a direct function of an FPGA's security capabilities.
Nonvolatile antifuse FPGAs, like Actel's MX family, are more secure against attack than the ASIC technologies they are replacing and therefore, satisfy an increasingly important market requirement.
The A42MX09 device selected by ECS is extremely secure, preventing copying or reverse engineering of the design.
The MX family, with density ranging from 3000 to 54,000 system gates, offers a fine-grained antifuse architecture similar to a masked gate array, providing a high-performance, low-cost solution for consumer, industrial and high-reliability applications.
The single-chip MX devices provide performance up to 250MHz, are live at power up, and require up to five times lower stand-by power consumption than any other FPGA device.
Actel's 42MX solutions feature MultiPlex I/Os, which support mixed-voltage systems, enable programmable PCI and deliver high-performance operation at both 5 and 3.3V.
• Actel Europe: contact details and other news
• Email this article to a colleague
• Register for the free Electronicstalk email newsletter
• Electronicstalk Home Page
Search the Pro-Talk network of sites
