Altera Corporation has announced it has expanded the MAX II device family to address the growing portable applications market. With new ultra-small packages, a new power-down capability and the lowest cost in the industry, MAX II devices offer designers of handheld applications half the cost and power of competing products. Altera MAX II CPLDs meet the small form-factor package and low power capabilities needed by designers of portable systems such as point-to-multipoint (PMP) systems, barcode scanners, PDAs and handheld sensors.

 

“After evaluating a number of component solutions, we determined that MAX II devices were the best fit for our Multiple Integrated Laser Engagement Systems (MILES)-compatible battery-powered wireless laser sensor,” said Mark Chaildin, systems engineer at Intercoastal Electronics. “MAX II devices’ low power consumption, short power-up times, density offerings and low cost help us stay competitive in the marketplace.”

 

According to the Gartner Dataquest report entitled “Semiconductor Forecast Worldwide-Forecast Database” by Nolan Reilly and Richard Gordon (May 2006), portable applications use in the consumer market is expected to grow from an estimated $16B in 2006 to $19B by 2008, a CAGR of 9 percent. The new MAX II ultra-small packages and power-down capabilities are targeted at this market and are expected to accelerate the adoption of MAX II devices into portable applications.

 

The MAX II EPM240, EPM570 and EPM1270 devices are now available in 100-pin and 256-pin 0.5-mm Micro FineLine BGA (MBGA) packages and 100-pin 1.0‑mm FineLine BGA (FBGA) package. Using the new MBGA packages, designers can integrate 50 percent more user I/O and logic elements (LEs) for a given board area, on average, than competing CPLD solutions. This makes MAX II CPLDs ideal for applications requiring high I/O count per board area (mm2) to interface with LCD displays, keypads, flash or memory. Designers can further reduce system cost by using the new packages and MAX II devices’ differentiating features, including high logic density, an on-chip voltage regulator and an internal oscillator, to integrate discrete devices and minimize the number of power rails.

 

MAX II CPLDs also offer the lowest dynamic power -- more than 50 percent lower than competing CPLD solutions -- and a power-down capability that conserves battery life. Unlike competing CPLDs, the power characteristics of MAX II devices enable them to power down to eliminate current draw entirely.

 

“Designers of portable or battery-powered applications face many of the same challenges that have fueled the programmable industry for the last twenty years, namely shortened schedules, feature uncertainty caused by changing industry standards and cost pressures. With a zero-power mode and package sizes common to this market, portable designers can now benefit from using CPLDs from Altera,” said Luanne Schirrmeister, Altera’s director of low-cost product marketing.

 

 

 

Altera has done an excellent job of reducing both power and solution cost of its new family of CPLDs to within spitting distance of more traditional solutions, something that now makes them a truly viable option for portable applications. This is in good part thanks to the fact that instead of using the EPROM-based technology traditionally used in CPLDs, the MAXII devices are actually FPGAs with blocks of embedded flash memory to program them. Using a look-up table (LUT) based interconnect scheme provides better cost, much lower power than one-to-any PTERM-based technologies, and enables practical scaling beyond 500 kMacrocells.

 

About the only penalty for adopting the technology that I can see is the several hundred milliseconds it takes to load the device from the on-chip Fash each time it’s powered up. Embedding the Fash on-chip eliminates the cost and longer load times you’d get with an external memory but there is still an upload delay of around 300 ms (actual time varies by device size). This could require a simple hold-off circuit to keep the rest of your logic from taking off before the CPLD is loaded (see Altera’s easy-to-follow app notes on this) http://www.altera.com/support/examples/max/exm-power-down.html but the delays shouldn’t be a factor for most applications.

 

And if you do need instant-on performance, the MAX II devices support a low-power standby mode that allows them to remain configured while drawing only 7 mA for the 1.8-V MAX IIG devices and 12 mA for the 3.3-V/2.5-V MAX II series. This is substantially better than most other devices currently on the market. More information on this, and implementing the devices no-power standby mode can be found in Altera’s extensive application information web pages. http://www.altera.com/products/devices/cpld/max2/features/low_power/mx2-low_power.html Operating power consumption is equally impressive with a 128 macrocell device running at 50 MHz drawing only 20 mW at 1.3V and 50 mW at 3.3V.

 

Of course CPLDs/FPGAs still carry a slightly higher per-function cost than fixed logic but Altera has done several interesting things to slash overall solution costs. This includes an integrated 1.8-V voltage regulator to enable 3.3-V, 2.5-V operation without an external regulator, as well as an on-chip 14 kHz oscillator to provide a no-cost clock where high accuracy is not an issue. But I think Altera’s slickest trick is the extra Flash memory they’ve incorporated that emulates a small (8-k)serial EPROM. This gives you a place that can be used to store configuration data, service history, or even a boot code segment for your host controller without shelling out the extra $0.25 - $0.40 for a discrete part.

 

Since the release above does a good job of describing the advantages of their MBGA (0.5-mm pitch) & FBGA packages a for the portable design environment, I’ll confine my comments to noting that they paid careful attention to laying out the I/O and power pins in a way that most PCB designs can be accomplished using only two layers.

 

The winning combination of low cost and high performance offered by Altera’s MAX II should make it very handy for stuff like board management logic, I/O expansion, microprocessor I/O, custom PCI interfaces, and even simple DSP functions. And while they will no doubt find lots of use elsewhere, the low power and compact form factor should give them the edge in the portable market they were looking for.

 

The EPM240 and EPM570, in FBGA-100, MBGA-100 are in production. Pricing for the EPM240 M100 is $1.25 in 250-k piece lots.