Product category:
Programmable Logic Devices
News Release from: Actel Europe | Subject: eX FPGAs
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 02 August 2004
FPGAs are vital link in wireless
Ethernet
Actel's low-power eX family of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are being used in Eleven Engineering's ETHx wireless Ethernet bridge platform.
Actel's low-power eX family of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are being used in Eleven Engineering's ETHx wireless Ethernet bridge platform ETHx is a complete chipset and product design package for secure driver-free 802.3-compliant point-to-point wireless Ethernet cable replacement that is suitable for use in low-cost consumer and commercial products at 900MHz, 2.4GHz and 5.8GHz
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 27 Nov 2003 at 8.00am (UK)
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Valeo's Electronics and Connective Systems Division uses Actel eX FPGAs to refine research and development programmes, enable advanced concepts and ultimately shorten time to production.
Actel's eX FPGAs serve as the high-speed I/O interface between Eleven Engineering's novel XInC wireless processor and an Ethernet PHY in the ETHx platform.
With internal clock speeds in excess of 350MHz and clock-to-out delays as fast as 3.9ns, Actel's eX FPGAs provide the performance necessary to enable fast I/O throughput for Eleven Engineering's high-speed XInC wireless processor.
"When designing our ETHx wireless Ethernet platform, we needed a cost-effective device that could keep up with the performance levels of our XInC wireless processor yet also maintain low-power operation".
Further reading
FPGA storage is unaffected by moisture
Actel has received moisture-sensitivity level 2 certification of its eX family of field-programmable gate arrays in chip-scale packaging.
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.
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.
"While this combination is difficult to achieve, the antifuse architecture of Actel's eX FPGAs solves the performance and power problem inherent in portable applications", said John Sobota, CEO of Eleven Engineering.
"As an added benefit, Actel's eX FPGAs provide excellent security features to fully protect our FPGA intellectual property from being copied or reverse engineered".
Dennis Kish, Vice President of Marketing at Actel, said: "Eleven Engineering's ETHx wireless Ethernet platform is a perfect example of the high-volume, portable, consumer applications for which our nonvolatile eX family is optimised".
"The eX devices achieve extremely low power consumption while offering high performance and enhanced security".
"To further benefit portable applications, our eX FGPA family is offered in extremely small chip-scale packages and thin quad flat packs, allowing us to fit more logic in a much smaller area than alternative solutions, which in turn permits our customers to offer increased portability and miniaturisation in their products".
Eleven Engineering's XInC wireless processor is a multithreaded-hardware 16bit pipelined RISC processor with eight independent hardware threads, each behaving as a separate processor with unrestricted access to main memory and the peripheral bus.
XInC's architecture results in outstanding MIPS per gate efficiency and slashed time-to-market.
When coupled with an Actel eX FPGA, high-speed I/O throughput between the XInC processor and other devices in the ETHx platform can be achieved.
Offering a low-power sleep mode for extra battery power savings, the eX family of devices is optimised for portable applications.
Additionally, the single-chip solutions are competitively priced compared with the cost of complex programmable logic devices (CPLDs), low-density gate array ASICs or two-chip FPGA alternatives.
The eX family has been designed into cable and xDSL modems, digital photography applications, MP3 Internet recorders/players, personal digital assistants and digital set-top boxes.
The combination of eX with simple-to-use Actel software tools results in faster design turns and time to market.
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