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Lattice inaugurates new India office; to develop ECP5 products
Lattice India GM, Sidhartha Mohanty and Lattice president and CEO, Darin G. Billerbeck at the opening of the India office.
Today, Lattice Semiconductor Corp. announced the official inauguration of Lattice India in a ribbon cutting ceremony in Koramangala, Bangalore, that included Lattice president and CEO, Darin G. Billerbeck, and Lattice India GM, Sidhartha (Sid) Mohanty.
Billerbeck noted: “We build mostly custom built products, and in future, we would be building more low cost products. We are now restructuring the company. In fact, we just completed our strategic long-term roadmap (SLR).
He added: If you look at India, we develop low-cost applications over here. It also helps in giving us better communications with customers. It is now an option for India to do hardware design. Some of our products will stay on 65nm for a long time.”
In FPGAs, Lattice is strong on the ECP3 family, a third generation high value FPGA, which offers the industry’s lowest power consumption and price of any SERDES-capable FPGA device.
The LatticeECP3 FPGA family offers multi-protocol 3.2G SERDES with XAUI jitter compliance, DDR3 memory interfaces,
Inaugurating the Lattice India office in Bangalore.
powerful DSP capabilities, high density on-chip memory and up to 149K LUTS, all with half the power consumption and half the price of competitive SERDES-capable FPGAs. The entire LatticeECP3 family is manufactured using Fujitsu’s advanced low power process technology.
Billerbeck noted that some of the ECP3 and ECP4 products will stay on the 65nm line. “ECP3 is already in production, while the ECP4 will be next. ECP5 family will come out in the next two years from now, and focus on 28nm.”
He noted: “We are not in an ‘arms race’ with the likes of Intel. Xilinx, etc. Our focus: We want to win in the low power. Our value proposition is in low power and communication spaces. We also want to be innovative.”
According to him, Altera had a great last year. Even Xilinx can bounce back. Lattice also has much more cash. It can do acquisitions now, if it so wishes. “People are now looking at new growth opportunities in smaller companies, so that’s a great opportunity. Our software team is very good. The guy in San Jose is very good.” Read more…
Semiconductor-IP directory for FPGAs indexes over 17,000 IP blocks and FPGA devices!
How does this help the global semiconductor industry? Most critically, customers can now search for semiconductor-IP and retrieve IP vendor datasheets, IP meta-information, and FPGA device configurations. Also, the meta-information includes IP interfaces, LUT, BRAM, I/O and embedded IP resources, costs and packages.
According to the release, Parallel Engines is the brainchild of its CEO, George Janac, Electronic Design Automation pioneer, founder of Chip Estimate; High Level Design Systems, and startup investor. “FPGA design has long been served by a disaggregated IP supply chain,” says Janac.
The next best thing to do was to get in touch with George Janac and have his thoughts.
First, I quizzed Janac about the need for such a site. He said that today, most IP portals are really the outgrowth of IPs for ASICs and SoCs.
Janac added: “The FPGA IP market really has no central IP place of its own. Also there is a unique need in FPGA to combine both IP and devices. Much of what is ASIC and SoC hard-IP (I/O, PHY, memory, PLL, etc.) is really embedded in an FPGA device. Hence, the need for a specialized portal. Also, many ASIC and SoC suppliers do not sell in FPGA and vice versa.” Very interesting indeed!
If this is the case, why develop such a site now, and why not earlier?
Janac explained: “Timing is driven by the sizes of the new generation of FPGAs, especially the recent announcements of the upcoming 28nm FPGA devices from Altera and Xilinx, respectively. These device will put the FPGA devices two to three generations ahead in IC technology compared to ASIC. It means that more and more systems that were ASIC, could be placed in FPGA.
“Additionally, we are seeing more heterogeneous FPGA devices from companies like Actel. These have high embedded content for analog, and ARM cores. Finding this kind of IP and mapping to these devices needs a new approach.” Read more…
Altera expands low-cost Cyclone FPGA series
Altera Corp. has introduced the Cyclone IV FPGAs, thereby expanding the success of the low-cost Cyclone series.
The Cyclone IV GX is said to be the lowest cost, lowest power FPGAs with transceivers, and the Cyclone IV E has helped it extend the lead in combining low cost, low power, and high functionality. Simultaneously, Altera also extended its transceiver portfolio leadership.
The Cyclone IV FPGA family offers two variants. Cyclone IV GX devices have up to 150K logic elements (LEs), up to 6.5-Mbits of RAM, up to 360 multipliers, and up to eight integrated 3.125-Gbps transceivers supporting mainstream protocols including Gigabit Ethernet (GbE), SDI, CPRI, V-by-One and Cyclone IV GX has hard IP for PCI Express (PCIe).
According to Jennifer Lo, Senior Marketing Manager, Altera, the company is pushing bandwidth limits in cost-sensitive markets and products — specifically, smartphones, wireless communications, industrial Ethernet, broadcast and 3D displays.
There is said to be a huge demand from Latin America, Asia, etc., specifically in wireless. Altera is providing a low cost, low power solution. Next, the trend is also moving from 2D to 3D displays. In broadcast it is moving to high bandwidth, in order to support HD video.
Easier for designers to debug FPGA designs
With the new Cyclone IV, will it become easier for designers to debug FPGA designs, especially when looking at the hardware and software aspects? Lo said that ease of use has always been a focus for low-end products for Altera.
“To that end, with Cyclone IV FPGA’s, like other Cyclone series, we strive to provide reference designs, design examples, development boards to customers to jump-start their design. With respect to debugging, we don’t see any particular differences between Cyclone IV and previous Cyclone generations.
“However, with more training, both fundamental trainings offered free on-line and more in-depth instructor-led trainings are available to help customers get accustomed with the Altera design methodology and use of our Industry-leading development software,” she added.
Altera had introduced the Cyclone III LS FPGA development kit, as well as shipments of industry’s first FPGAs with integrated 11.3-Gbps transceivers. How are all of these going to help Altera overall, given that Q3 saw a 3 percent increase; and help boost FPGA sales?
Lo added: “FPGAs usually have a longer design cycle (at least a few months before prototyping and another few months till mass production. With the recent few product additions, Altera is in a technology leadership position that we are all very proud of and confident that we will be able to reap the results of in the near future.” Read more…
Think AND not OR; Altera first @ 40nm FPGAs
Altera has announced two new product lines — the Stratix IV FPGAs, which feature up to 680K logic elements, as well as the HardCopy IV ASICs, which has Gigabit transceivers embedded within the PLCs and allow seamless FPGA prototyping to hard core ASIC production.
Altera has also introduced the Quartus II software v8.0, which delivers unprecedented performance and productivity for FPGAs. It allows customers to assign power constraints on designs.
This is a global launch, and I feel proud to be associated with it. I am probably among the earliest to break this news to the world!
“All of these have been made possible due to Altera’s relationship with TSMC,” according to Gangatharan Gopal, country manager, India, Altera Semiconductor India Pvt. Ltd.
Altera’s 40nm devices are targeted at high-end applications such as wireless and wireline communications, military, broadcasting and ASIC prototyping.
The Statix IV FPGAs feature 680K logic elements, up to 22.4Mbits internal RAM, up to 48 transceiver blocks operating at up to 8.5Gbps, core performance of 350MHz, and hard IP for PCI Express Gen 1 and Gen 2.
The Stratix IV FPGAs are available in two majpr product groups — the GX devices or Gigabit Ethernet devices, which have up to 530K logic elements, and the E devices or enhanced Stratix IV, which support more memory per logic element. There are a total of eight devices per family.
The HardCopy ASICs IV feature seamless prototyping, so that customers can have the same RTL, same IP set and one tool, come with transceivers — similar transceiver block as the Stratix IV, offer lowest risk and lowest total cost access to deep sub-micron ASIC benefits, and provde 50x low power than companion FPGAs.
The HardCopy IV features 13.3 million gates. Gopal said: “Altera has surpassed the average industry ASIC density. We are now offering 13.3 million gates with HardCopy IV. With this, we can now address 80 percent of the market requirements.”
The HardCopy IV also comes in GX and E versions. Each version has six devices, supporting more memories and transceiver blocks.
Higher densities require higher levels of productivity
Altera’s Quartus II software v8.0 is specifically addressing this market need. It is said to be leading in productivity for high-end FPGAs and HardCopy ASICs. Features include TimeQuest — for timing analysis, Compilation Speed — via incremental compilation, PowerPlay technology — which allows power management; and SOPC Builder — which facilitates system-level design.
Altera is addressing the issue of compile times at three fronts — algorithms, multiprocessor support and incremental compile support. The Quartus II v8.0 is said to deliver 20 percent average annual compile time improvement.
Introducing FPGA Central!
All of those related to the FPGA and VLSI segments, there’s reason to rejoice. The world’s first dedicated portal on FPGAs is here!
FPGA Central is said to be central place to find complete info about FPGA vendors, products, IPs, etc.
Field programmable gate array, aka, FPGAs is a semiconductor device containing programmable logic components called ‘logic blocks’, and programmable interconnects. They are especially popular for prototyping integrated circuit designs. Once the design is set, hardwired chips are produced for faster performance. Its flexibility and low cost of implementation is the key factor for its success.
FPGA Central aims to bring all FPGA related information under one central location. A vendor neutral place to find everything about FPGAs, CPLDs, EDA Tools for FPGAs.
FPGA Central has been created to provide a central place for FPGA vendors and users to share experiences and information about FPGA design, development, verification, validation, process, tools and products.
The sites major feature includes:
* Largest FPGA vendor directory (over 450)
* Vast product directory (over 800)
* IP catalog (over 750)
* Find FPGA events around the world
* FPGA discussion forums
* Latest FPGA news and press releases
* FPGA jobs listing
A release said: “We are enhancing user experience by providing reviews and ratings of all the listing on our Web site. The users are encouraged to discuss their problems and share thoughts.” This is just the beginning! Over the next couple of months, FPGA Central plans to add more features to help users to make more informative decisions and vendors to showcase their products.
Need I say more? I was also able to post two articles and the previous blog on the ISA-VSI awards on FPGA Central. Look forward to receiving the newsletters as well. At least, I won’t need to look around all over the Web for FPGA related stuff, and believe that FPGA Central would do the job for me.
Pradeep Chakraborty 