Aliso Viejo, Calif. – Microsemi Corporation (Nasdaq: MSCC), a leading provider of semiconductor solutions differentiated by power, security, reliability and performance, today announced the availability of the company’s new largest density, lowest power SmartFusion®2 150K LE System-on-Chip (SoC) FPGA Advanced Development Kit. Board-level designers and system architects can quickly develop system-level designs by using the two FPGA Mezzanine Card (FMC) expansion headers to connect a wide range of new functions with off-the-shelf daughter cards, which significantly reduces design time and cost when creating new applications for communications, industrial, defense and aerospace markets.
“Microsemi’s new SmartFusion2 150K LE Advanced Development Kit is ideal for designers developing low power, high security and highly reliable SoC applications,” said Shakeel Peera, senior director of product line marketing at Microsemi. “With our largest density 150K LE device onboard, the development kit will enable customers to design applications for the complete SmartFusion2 family. Additionally, designers can accelerate their time-to-market and reduce development costs for high density designs by leveraging the two industry-standard FMC headers to develop or access pre-designed functional blocks on off-the-shelf daughter cards.”
The new SmartFusion2 SoC FPGA Advanced Development Kit offers a full featured 150K LE device SmartFusion2 SoC FPGA. This industry-leading low power 150K LE device inherently integrates reliable flash-based FPGA fabric, a 166 MHz Cortex™ M3 processor, digital signal processing (DSP) blocks, static random-access memory (SRAM), embedded nonvolatile memory (eNVM) and industry-required high-performance communication interfaces—all on a single chip. Microsemi estimates its market for FPGAs to be around $2.5 billion. This is based on estimates garnered from iSuppli and competitive financial reports which report on revenue for individual product families.
The new FMC headers provide designers additional cost savings, the ability to accelerate design development, and helps significantly reduce time-to-market on designs by providing the opportunity to leverage a wide range of standard off-the-shelf daughter cards for applications such as image and video processing, serial connectivity (SATA/SAS, SFP, SDI) and analog (A/D, D/A). The release of this kit also complements Microsemi’s expertise and IP in JESD204B, supporting the growing enterprise market for high speed data conversion for applications such as radar, satellite, broadband communications and communications test equipment.
Also included with the kit is a one-year platinum license for Microsemi’s advanced Libero SoC design software, valued at $2,500. With the Libero SoC design software Microsemi has created enhanced ease-of-use and design efficiencies with leading edge design wizards, editors and scripting engines that allow customers a faster time-to-market for SmartFusion2 and IGLOO2 FPGA-based designs.
About SmartFusion2 SoC FPGA Advanced Development Kit
The SmartFusion2 SoC FPGA Advanced Development Kit board has numerous standard and advanced peripherals such as: PCIe®x4 edge connector, two FMC connectors for developing solutions offered with off-the-shelf daughter cards, USB, Philips inter-integrated circuit (I2C), two gigabit Ethernet ports, serial peripheral interface (SPI) and UART. A high precision operational amplifier circuitry on the board helps to measure core power consumption by the device.
The SmartFusion2 SoC FPGA memory management system is supported by 1GB of onboard double data rate3 (DDR3) memory and 2GB SPI flash—1GB connected to the Microcontroller Subsystem (MSS) and 1GB connected to the FPGA fabric. The serializer and deserializer (SERDES) blocks can be accessed through the peripheral component interconnect express (PCIe) edge connector or high speed sub-miniature push-on (SMA) connectors or through on-board FMC connector.
Key SmartFusion2 150LE SoC Advanced Development Kit Features
Largest 150K LE development device
2x FMC connectors (HPC and LPC)
Purchase of kits comes with a free one-year Libero SoC design software platinum license (valued at$2,500)
DDR3, SPI FLASH
2x Gigabit Ethernet connectors
SMA connectors
PCIe x4 edge connector
Power measurement test points
For more information on Microsemi’s SmartFusion2 SoC FPGA Evaluation Kit, visit www.microsemi.com/fpgaevaluationkit. Customers can also contact Microsemi’s sales team at sales.support@microsemi.com.
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