FPGAs for rapid response to market opportunities

Gothic Components is targeting consumer applications such as handheld and home-entertainment equipment with new e-Appliance FPGAs from Actel.

Gothic Components is targeting consumer applications such as handheld and home-entertainment equipment with new e-Appliance FPGAs from Actel.

The distributor says the low power consumption, nonvolatility and inherent short development cycle associated with Actel's antifuse technology are ideal characteristics for use in such products.

e-Appliance FPGAs have been conceived in response to the narrow market window of modern electronic products, and the imperative of rapid prototyping and development.

Supported by established Actel development tools including the DeskTOP and Designer Series environments, they are designed to combine low power and small form factor, enabling the power budget, cost and footprint of new products to be substantially reduced.

Generous local and global routing resources allow 100% pin locking, enabling concurrent FPGA and PCB development to shrink time-to-market.

The low power consumption of e-Appliance FPGAs allows lightweight, battery-powered equipment to extend standby and active periods, and reduces thermal dissipation in all types of equipment.

This enhances reliability and reduces instances where an external heat sink or cooling fan is required.

Using e-Appliance FPGAs enables a single chip solution, eliminating the penalties associated with a discrete implementation, and also negating the additional cost and device footprint of an external configuration ROM.

Configuration memory is required by all SRAM-based FPGAs.

The e-Appliance family includes the eX64, eX128 and eX256 devices, offering from 64 to 256 dedicated registers in advanced packages including TQFP and CSP with up to 130 user I/Os.

The eX-series devices also feature a low power sleep mode of less than 100 mA standby current to further extend battery life.

Higher on-chip resources are provided by the SX08A, SX16A and SX32A FPGAs, which provide up to 1080 dedicated registers and 48,000 system gates, with user I/O allocation from 130 to 249 pins.

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