programmablelogicZONE Products for the week of October 8, 2007
Actel Corp. Says…
Expanding Portable Market Addressed With Industry’s Lowest Power FPGAs
ARM Cortex-M1 processor-enabled IGLOO Family and Multi-phase Portable Application Initiative
Acknowledging the unique challenges facing today's portable designers, Actel Corporation detailed its strategy to increase market penetration for the company's ultra low-power IGLOO field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) in the rapidly growing portable market. Leveraging the company's leading power-efficient IGLOO FPGAs and ARM Cortex-M1 processor technologies, the company today introduced its new M1-enabled IGLOO FPGAs which offer significant power, cost and size advantages for portable applications. Also the company outlined its multi-phased plan to deliver storage, display and control-related development boards, reference designs and intellectual property (IP) cores.
According to Rich Wawrzyniak, senior market analyst, ASIC and SoC at In-Stat, "Portable applications are a rapidly growing market for programmable logic as sales in these applications is forecasted to exceed $500 million by 2010. 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. "By optimizing the ARM Cortex-M1 processor for the industry's lowest power FPGA family, Actel provides a single-chip solution that reduces cost, power, board space and design complexity—the result of this unprecedented combination." East continued, "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."
Actel's First Target: Portable Storage
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, announced here, is focused on storage. Working with its partners, Actel offers three different platforms to demonstrate how storage controllers and interfaces can be programmed into the FPGA and made to work with industry-leading 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.
Also leveraging Actel's low-power, flash-based devices, PalmChip 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.
EN-Genius Says…
Actel’s ultra-low-power FPGAs are the Rodney Dangerfield of the FPGA world -- they offer lots of technical advantages but have had a hard time getting any respect in the shadow of their much larger competitors. This may change thanks to a double-pronged initiative that adds a new processor plus a bunch of application-specific cores to their IP library and teams these versatile devices with the development platforms of a couple of embedded processors. Since many of the most popular processor chips are somewhat deficient in the I/O department, Actel’s choice to focus their first offerings on storage solutions should help make their low-cost devices a very attractive alternative to ASICs in portable designs, especially now that they’ve made their powerful ARM-based Cortex-M1 processor core available on their low-cost IGLOO series.
Instead of the proprietary processor architectures offered by other ASIC vendors, Actel gives you royalty-free access to the popular ARM RISC instruction set. Their latest version is the Cortex M1 which was developed specifically for FPGA implementation. It’s a smaller, faster (up to 37 MHz on IGLOO, 72 MHz on ProASIC) version of their earlier ARM-7 core that supports the ARM Thumb-2 extensions. The Thumb-2 set builds on the original 16-bit ARM-7 with 32-bit operations plus other enhancements and is very amenable to extensions that permit DSP-like operations. Even on a relatively small FPGA, the M1 has a relatively small footprint, consuming about 4500 tiles of a typical 13.6 k tile (650 k gate) chip. If you need to slip into something larger, the IGLOO family has devices as big as 75,000 tiles. In keeping with IGLOO’s focus on low power, the M1 draws 2 µA at idle (the dominant state in most portable applications).
Actel has wisely taken a page out of its competitors’ play book and is packaging the Coretex-M1 core along with other IP to provide packages that focus on specific applications and markets. In the case of the storage-oriented solutions they’re announcing they’ve also done a good job of working with several big-time players like Marvell and Freescale whose processors frequently need a bridge between their simple memory-mapped I/O and the rest of the universe. The third-party eval boards described in the release above should allow developers to assemble cores for SD, MMC, NAND Flash, and other I/O to build and test the embedded equivalent of a custom super I/O chip before they have to mess with IP licensing. Actel said that their CE-ATA interface is also very popular among embedded designers and hinted that there should be a SATA interface available shortly.
Actel’s other ace-in-the-hole is its extremely low static power consumption. In case you’re not familiar with Actel IGLOO and ProASIC families, I’ll put in a brief plug for their unique non-volatile logic technology that gives them standby power consumption in the microwatt range. It uses embedded Flash memory elements integrated into each 2-transistor logic cell rather than a 6 - 8 transistor SRAM that’s cell loaded from a separate flash array (on or off chip) that’s used by every other manufacturer I know of. The smaller transistor count (and a few other architectural subtleties) results in a much lower leakage current, lower operating power and smaller chips, as well as true instant on capabilities.
Improvements in power detection circuits (that verify useable operating voltages) have dramatically cut idle currents in the latest generation of devices. This, and raising their logic threshold voltage from 0.4 V to 0.6 V has cut standby current on a typical a 250 k gate part from 5 mA to 15 µA. In many handheld applications this idle state accounts for 95% - 99% of a PDA’s operational time so it’s easy to see why Actel claims it can extend a product’s run time by 5x, or more.
Of course, power savings like this do come at a price. In this case it’s the very limited number of read/write cycles (about 1000) that the current embedded Flash cell structure can support. I’d agree with Actel that this is not a problem for most designs because it’s more than enough for nearly all of the consumer applications where these low-cost devices are expected to be used.
This combination of low power, low cost, and a good set of application-specific IP and development tools make these FPGAs a good alternative to ASICs in moderate (10 - 50 k) production volumes. Even in lower volumes, where bottom-end CPLDs have dominated, Actel’s new chip-scale packages allow them to deliver much more logic density, a smaller form factor and more I/O in the same area at about the same price.
Maybe now Actel will get a little respect.
The M1AGL600 is in production with additional family members due in 2008. Volume pricing starts at $3.70 for a small M1 IGLOO device.
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