•  
• EDN Europe MAGAZINE
•  
• Free SUBSCRIPTION
• Subscription Renewal
• View Media Kit

• EDN
• EDN Australia
• EDN Asia
• EDN China
• EDN Japan

Actel chills out with new ARM offering

Ports Cortex M1 to IGLOO low-power FPGAs

Actel was the first FPGA company to offer a mainstream-IP ‘soft’ processor core on an FPGA fabric when it added ARM to its offering. Now, the company has extended that offering to include an optimised versions of the Cortex-M1 core on its IGLOO family of low-power flash-memory-based FPGAs. As with the previous ARM product offering, the cores will be provided free of licence or royalty fees from you (the user) to ARM; IP royalties are absorbed by Actel as part of the build costs of the ARM-enabled product. IGLOO chips have static power in the microwatt range at a level which their designers say is 200 times lower than other FPGAs of comparable complexity. Implemented in an IGLOO chip, the M1 core will account for 24 uA static and 3 uA in sleep mode. The chips also have Actel’s FlashFreeze mode that preserves SRAM and memory data in a low-power state giving you easy entry to, and recovery from, a power-down state.
Actel negotiated the original licence agreement with ARM, the company says, in part due to the high level of security its architecture affords to configuration data on the chip – giving ARM the confidence that its IP (along with your product-specific data) was secure from copying or cloning. In the same way, the IGLOO parts on which the Cortex M1 resides – initially, the M1AGL600 – are physically unchanged from the standard offering other than the fact that they are pre-code by Actel to enable them to accept the encrypted bit stream that implements the M1 core. The core will use, Actel says, about one-third of the available gates on that chip. Pricing for the chip will be from $3.70 “in volume”. The standard ARM development tool chain provides the software design environment.