Product category:
Programmable Logic Devices
News Release from: Actel Europe | Subject: Igloo AGL015 and ProASIC3 A3P015
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 20 February 2008
Low-cost FPGAs start under a buck
New Igloo AGL015 and ProASIC3 A3P015 FPGAs provide lower cost, lower power alternative to low-density FPGAs and CPLDs in consumer, medical, comms and industrial applications
Directly addressing design requirements for programmable solutions that meet ever-tightening power and cost budgets, Actel Corporation has added two new members to its award-winning Igloo and successful ProASIC3 field-programmable gate array (FPGA) families starting at just US $0.99 Comparable in density to 128 macrocell complex programmable logic device (CPLD) offerings, the new 15,000-gate devices offer power consumption as low as 55uW, 10 times less static power than more expensive CPLDs
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 23 Apr 2001 at 8.00am (UK)
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The new Igloo AGL015 and ProASIC3 A3P015 FPGAs provide a lower cost, lower power alternative to low-density FPGAs and CPLDs in consumer, medical, communications and industrial applications, such as portable media players, smart phones, memory card interfaces, system controllers, portable medical devices and wireless sensors.
"There continues to be tremendous demand for low-power programmable solutions at lower densities to handle the control and bridging functions in portable designs", says Fares Mubarak, Senior Vice President at Actel.
"At this new price point, no other low-density FPGA or CPLD can achieve power consumption as low as that offered by the new Igloo and ProASIC3 devices, making these low-density solutions the ideal choice for power- and price-sensitive applications".
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Attractive for portable applications with 5uW static power, Actel's Igloo FPGAs consume more than 200x less static power than competitive FPGA offerings and deliver more than 10x the battery life of the current leading PLDs in portable applications.
Consuming as little as 5uW of static power and 50% less dynamic power than Actel's 30,000-gate AGL030 device, the Igloo AGL015 device supports both 1.2 and 1.5V operation and offers up to 250MHz system performance, 49 available I/Os and 1Kbit of nonvolatile Flash ROM.
The 1.5V ProASIC3 A3P015 device offers up to 350MHz system performance, 49 I/Os and 1Kbit of nonvolatile Flash ROM.
To allow for further system cost, power and area reductions, the new Igloo and ProASIC3 FPGAs offer the ability to bridge between two different I/O voltages levels and 1Kbit of on-chip memory, potentially eliminating the need for discrete devices.
Used in the ProASIC3 and Igloo architectures, a unique Versatile core cell is automatically used as combinatorial or sequential logic by the Actel Libero integrated design environment, enabling more efficient routing, flexibility and device utilisation when compared with fixed-architecture CPLD solutions.
The Igloo AGL015 and ProASIC3 A3P015 FPGAs will sample in March with volume production in Q2 2008.
The devices are offered in 8 x 8mm single-row quad flat no-lead (QFN) packages, minimising printed circuit board (PCB) costs.
The devices are supported by the Actel Libero IDE v8.2 SP1.
Device pricing starts at $0.99 for the A3P015 and AGL015 devices in volume.
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