Lattice Semiconductor — Low-Power General Purpose FPGA

Lattice’s FPGAs have reaffirmed themselves as the leader in low power FPGAs. The Certus-NX FPGAs address many different markets simultaneously, while offering industry-leading low-power and small-size packages.

Certus-NX brings the benefits of Lattice’s Nexus FPGA technology to new markets, targeting applications that need PCI Express and Ethernet connectivity. The new product comes in two models, one with 17,000 logic cells and the other with 39,000. The larger Certus-NX-40 offers a PCIe Gen2 interface that can connect to host processors, wireless or wired communications chips, and many other devices. Both models support Gigabit Ethernet using hard circuitry to improve performance and power efficiency.

The new products also offer much smaller packages than competitors do while doubling their I/O density. The Nexus platform is unique in employing FD-SOI manufacturing. This technology takes a different approach from standard CMOS that greatly reduces power. This capability enables Certus-NX to use 3-4x less power than similar FPGAs from Intel and Xilinx. Faster configuration times allow systems to boot faster. Another hard block offloads both authentication and encryption to improve security functions.

Built on Lattice’s Nexus platform, the Certus-NX delivers up to 4x lower power vs. similar FPGAs, with up to 100x higher reliability, due to a 100x lower Soft Error Rate (SER) from 28 nm FD-SOI technology.

Features

• Up to 39K logic cells, 2.9 Mb embedded memory, 56 18 x 18 multipliers, 192 programmable I/O, one lane of 5 Gbps PCIe, two lanes of 1.25 Gbps SGMII, two ADCs (each 12-bit, 1 MSPS).
• Packages as small as 6x6 mm, and in ball-pitch options of 0.5 and 0.8 mm.
• Power modes – User selectable Low Power vs. High Performance modes, enabled by FD-SOI programmable back-bias.
• Design security – ECDSA bitstream authentication, coupled with robust AES-256 encryption.
• Instant-on configuration – I/O configures in 3 ms, and full-device as fast as 8 ms.