Product category:
Programmable Logic Devices
News Release from: Actel Europe | Subject: Igloo FPGAs
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 19 September 2007
FPGAs suit portable applications
Reprogrammable FPGAs offer the flexibility required to address changing standards and speed time to market.
Actel has released M1-enabled Igloo FPGAs, which offer significant power, cost and size advantages for portable applications Rich Wawrzyniak, Senior Market Analyst, ASIC and SoC at In-Stat said, "Portable applications are a rapidly growing market for programmable logic as sales in these applications is forecasted to exceed US $500 million by 2010"
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 19 Dec 2007 at 8.00am (UK)
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"More and more, a low-power, reprogrammable solution is required to adapt to evolving standards, speed time to market and deliver the footprint and power consumption required for the next cutting-edge silicon solution".
"Our M1-enabled Fusion and ProASIC3 product lines have experienced significant success, demonstrating the rising demand for FPGA design platforms that leverage industry-standard processors", said Actel President and CEO, John East.
"Our tailored Igloo-based programs focused on the portable storage, display and control arenas will ensure that we offer the complementary products and technologies needed to ensure the rapid deployment of low-power FPGA technology into portable applications".
Further reading
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.
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.
As standards and platforms continue to emerge and evolve, designers need to be able to quickly adapt.
Reprogrammable FPGAs offer the flexibility required to address these changing standards and speed time to market.
Actel's first portable solution phase is focused on storage.
Actel offers three different platforms to demonstrate how storage controllers and interfaces can be programmed into the FPGA and made to work with processors such as the Marvell PXA and Freescale i.MX.
Targeted at smart phones, GPS devices or PDAs, the first platform is a storage daughter card for Marvell Semiconductor's Littleton PXA 300/310 handheld platform development kit.
Actel's Igloo AGL600, featured on this daughter card jointly developed with Arasan Chip Systems, extends the processor's capability, enabling Igloo to act as a bridge function and provide additional peripheral support for SD, MicroSD and CE-ATA storage standards.
A second board, a full-featured Freescale i.MX27 processor development platform from iWave Systems, can demonstrate the Igloo AGL125 FPGA as an ultra low-power SD/MMC or CE-ATA controller for PDA, point-of-sale terminals, rugged data communication devices and GPS applications.
PalmChip also offers a storage daughter card for cameras, smart phones and security and surveillance applications.
The Actel FPGA serves as a bridge from the processor bus to multiple storage interfaces, including ATA 6, CE-ATA, SD 1.1/2.0, MMC, CompactFlash 3.0 and CardBus 2.1/PCMCIA.
While the platform includes the Marvell PXA 270 processor, the solution also serves as a reference design for X-Scale and ARM processors.
Rounding out the company's storage development boards are hard disk drive (HDD), Flash storage IP cores and multiple bridge interfaces available from Actel's CompanionCore partners, Arasan, iWave and Palmchip.
HDD solutions include ATA, ATAPI and CE-ATA.
For Flash storage, solutions include CompactFlash, SD/MMC, Managed NAND and NAND Flash control.
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