Product category:
Design and Development Hardware
News Release from: Actel Europe | Subject: Silicon Sculptor 3
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 23 August 2006
Tool boosts FPGA programming
productivity
FPGA programming tool delivers high data throughput and promotes ease of use, while lowering the overall cost of ownership.
Available now from Actel, Silicon Sculptor 3 is an FPGA programming tool that delivers high data throughput and promotes ease of use, while lowering the overall cost of ownership The Silicon Sculptor 3 includes a high-speed USB 2.0 interface that allows a customer to connect as many as 12 programmers to a single PC
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 5 Aug 2008 at 8.00am (UK)
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Further, Silicon Sculptor 3 is compatible with adapter modules from Silicon Sculptor II, thereby preserving a customer's investment and enabling a seamless upgrade to this latest generation of the tool.
"Silicon Sculptor 3 provides a cost-effective solution for system designers and small to mid-sized production centres, allowing them to expand programming capabilities without acquiring additional PCs or software", said Jake Chuang, Senior Director of Marketing for Application Solutions at Actel.
"With a high-speed USB 2.0 interface, our easy-to-use, flexible new programmer meets the fast data processing needs of today's users, and has headroom to expand as design speed, density and complexity increase".
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.
Leveraging an antifuse-based Axcelerator FPGA device at the heart of the system, Silicon Sculptor 3 offers 4x the memory size compared with the previous generation programmer as well as faster data processing.
With 64Mbyte of internal memory, the Silicon Sculptor 3 allows concurrent programming of highly dense parts that could only be programmed nonconcurrently with prior programmers, which means higher throughput is now possible for even the densest of parts.
This additional memory will also support the larger algorithms of planned future parts.
With a USB 2.0 interface, Silicon Sculptor 3 systems can be connected to as many as 12 PCs through a series of nested high-speed USB 2.0 hubs, enabling an easily expandable, low-to-medium volume production programming system to be dynamically assembled.
Protection features include, overcurrent and power failure shutdowns as well as electrostatic discharge (ESD) protection.
A banana jack for ESD wrist straps is also included.
Actel offers support of all device packages including, but not limited to PLCC, PQFP, VQFP, VQFP, QFN, BGA, FBGA and CSP.
Silicon Sculptor 3 is the optimal low-cost programmer for Actel's entire portfolio of FPGAs, including the standard and ARM-enabled versions of both the ProASIC3 family and the Actel Fusion Programmable System Chips.
It also supports the company's entire line of products including the antifuse-based RTAX-S product offerings.
Actel's Silicon Sculptor 3 is available now for $3400.
The tool is compliant with Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional and Windows XP Professional.
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