FPGAs

Altera has announced silicon availability of the industry’s highest density transceiver FPGA. As the second member of the Altera Stratix IV GX FPGA family to ship, the EP4SGX530 is 60 percent larger than the largest transceiver FPGA on the market. The device offers 530K logic elements (LEs), up to 48 transceivers operating at up to 8.5 Gbps, 20.3 Mbits of RAM and 1,040 embedded multipliers. Stratix IV GX devices target numerous applications in the communications, broadcast, test, medical and military markets.

The recent addition of high-speed UARTs to the library of functions for QuickLogic's low-power, configurable Customer Specific Standard Product (CSSP) logic platforms for consumer electronics, is providing a versatile upgrade path for smartphone developers. It offers a power-efficient single-chip solution to expand the interfacing capability of a mobile application processor to support high-datarate Bluetooth, as well as the integration of further high-desirability peripherals such as GPS.

CISSOID has announced its CHT-74 Logic Family for extreme temperatures. The products are optimized for High-Temperature, High Reliability applications. They bring digital functions to system designers targeting high temperature electronics, even beyond 200°C.

Linear Technology has expanded its I2C and SMBus Bus Buffer and Rise Time Accelerator family with the introduction of the LTC4308 and LTC4309. As the number of plug-in boards continues to increase, additive capacitances begin to critically lengthen rise times. Breaking the bus into several pieces with bus buffers alleviates this problem, but if the buffer offsets are too large, logic low voltage specifications may be violated.

Keeping its commitment to the industrial, military and high reliability market, QuickLogic has now achieved volume production of its PolarPro QL1P1000 in a mil-spec temperature rating. QL1P1000 integrates one million gates of the industry's lowest-power configurable logic technology, together with embedded memory built-in FIFO control, and advanced clock management control units.

QuickLogic announces that the one million gate version of PolarPro, the industry's lowest power programmable logic technology, is now available in a mil-spec temperature rating. This innovative programmable device, incorporating embedded memory with built-in FIFO control, and advanced clock management control units, offers unparalleled design security.

Ramtron International Corporation has expanded its non-volatile state saver family with the quad state saver – a 4-bit FRAM-based device that retains logic states without power and restores outputs automatically upon power up. Any change in state is automatically recorded in the non-volatile ferroelectric latch, which is possible due to the fast writes, low power, and extremely high endurance of FRAM memory technology.

STMicroelectronics has introduced the Xpander Logic family to help customers overcome the limited number of I/O ports in microcontroller and microprocessor-based embedded systems. Any existing or additional I/O-intensive tasks on the central processing unit (CPU) can be now reassigned to the Xpander Logic IC that operates off ultra-low power and comes in a very small package, making it ideal for portable multimedia devices such as mobile phones, smartphones, and personal digital assistants.

QuickLogic Europe has released of 300,000- and 200,000-gate versions of the PolarPro device. Designated QL1P300 and QL1P200, these large FPGAs with embedded SRAM are the third and fourth members of the PolarPro family to reach full production status. They complement existing versions with 100,000 and 75,000 gates. By combining the flexibility and fast development times of FPGAs with ASIC-like density and very low power consumption, QL1P200 and QL1P300 create solutions for consumer electronics products such as smartphones, personal media players (PMPs) and portable navigation devices, as well as industrial handheld products.

DT Electronics is now stocking Xilinx Spartan-3E Starter Kits. Each kit is a complete development board including power supply, evaluation software, resource CD containing comprehensive technical data, and a USB cable. The kits support the Xilinx Spartan-3E and CoolRunner-II families of devices. They have an on-board 50MHz crystal clock oscillator, 128Mb parallel flash, 16Mb SPI flash and 64MB of DDR SRAM.