FPGAs, Actel, IGLOO PLUS

Actel Ices Competition With New Low-Power, I/O-Optimised FPGA Family

News Release from: Actel Europe Ltd
17/03/2008

Actel Corporation has introduced IGLOO PLUS, a family of low-power field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) with what is said to be the industry's best power-, area-, logic- and feature-per-I/O ratios in a programmable device. The new 5µW I/O-optimised IGLOO PLUS family also offers up to 64 percent more I/Os than the company's award-winning IGLOO family and supports independent Schmitt Trigger inputs, hot swapping and Flash Freeze bus hold.

The low-power consumption and I/O optimisation of the IGLOO PLUS family makes it an ideal solution for portable electronics in consumer, industrial, communications, medical and test applications, particularly those employing I/O-intensive memory bus manipulation, general-purpose I/O expansion, sequencing, interface translation, storage and human interface touch screen and key pad technology.

“Users continue to demand a growing list of features on their portable devices, and yet expect the cost and battery life of those devices to remain the same,” said Fares Mubarak, senior vice president of Actel Corporation. “Today, the new I/O-optimised, cost-effective IGLOO PLUS family gives designers a sophisticated feature-rich programmable logic platform for dramatically reducing power consumption without sacrificing functionality or driving up the cost of their end products.”

For any given package size, IGLOO PLUS delivers the industry’s best power-, area-, logic- and feature-per-I/O ratios in a programmable device. An IGLOO PLUS device delivers 6x better static power consumption, a 50% reduction in dynamic power consumption, a 2x improvement in I/O density and as much as 2.7x the logic density compared with competitive programmable logic devices in a similar package. For example, a competitive SRAM-based programmable solution in a 8mm x 8mm chip-scale package offers 25k equivalent system gates, 78 I/Os and 25 mW typical static power versus the 60k system gates, 157 I/Os and 10µW of an AGLP060 IGLOO PLUS FPGA in the same package.

Optimised for I/O-intensive portable applications, the new Actel IGLOO PLUS solutions also offer up to 16x better power per I/O. Assuming a design requires 100 I/Os, the 120-I/O AGLP030 IGLOO PLUS device consumes 5µW versus the roughly 60µW of the nearest competitive solution.

“Power consumption has moved to the forefront of issues involved in designing tomorrow’s electronic systems”, said Jordan Selburn, principal analyst at iSuppli, El Segundo, California. “Engineers have to tackle chip power first and foremost, yet still meet all of the technical requirements such as performance and interface – all while staying in budget. As FPGAs continue to cut power and price while simultaneously moving up in performance and pin count, iSuppli expects these devices to make further gains in power- and space-constrained applications.”