Actel Targets e-Appliance Consumer Applications With New, Low-Cost 'eX' Programmable ASIC Family
SUNNYVALE, Calif., Sept. 11 -- As part of a new strategy to target vertical markets, Actel Corporation today announced "eX,'' a programmable ASIC (application specific integrated circuit) product family aimed at the emerging e-Appliance market of Internet-related consumer electronics. This market includes such products as MP3 Internet recorders/players, digital photography, cable and xDSL modems, personal digital assistants and digital set-top boxes. Actel has already shipped over one million units of its MX FPGA family to MP3 manufacturers.
By featuring low cost, low power, a small footprint and the ease of achieving performance specifications during the design process, the eX family is expected to help Actel continue its dominance of the logic integration market for consumer and e-Appliance applications. The combination of eX with simple-to-use Actel software tools results in faster design turns and a rapid time-to-market capability. The Actel eX family also adds the benefits of high design security and a small, single-chip form factor.
"We are using Actel devices in a ground-breaking digital imaging product for the consumer e-Appliance market,'' stated Douglas Howe, chief marketing officer at Silicon Film Technologies, Inc. of Irvine, California. "Actel has been right there with us throughout our development phase, and their nonvolatile FPGAs being used in our first offering have proven to be well-suited for this application's low power and small footprint requirements. We would certainly expect that a new Actel family specifically targeted at the high-volume, e-Appliance market will be very popular.''
The eX family will consist of three devices: the eX64, eX128 and eX256 with system gate densities of 3,000, 6,000 and 12,000, respectively. The eX line will offer a streamlined feature set clearly differentiated for this market. The eX line also adds a low-power sleep mode for extra battery power savings, a critical concern for most e-Appliance applications. The single-chip eX solutions will be very competitively priced compared to the total cost of multiple CPLDs, low-density gate array ASICs or two-chip FPGA alternatives. The new family is being fabricated at UMC in a 0.22-micron process and will be available in three speed grades.
"We think high-performance, low-power FPGAs offering their inherent fast time to market for as low as $2.25 each in high-volume will get this emerging market's attention,'' said Anita Weemaes, product marketing manager at Actel. "We have already had considerable success with our MX and SX-A products in this space and should be able to extend our influence with a device family targeted at this market.''
Design Support, Availability and Price
The eX128 in a 64-pin TQFP is available today in pre-production volume. Production release of Actel's Designer place-and-route tool in R1 2000 software supporting eX64 and ex128 designs in TQ64 and TQ100 packages is available now. Software and package support for the eX256 device is expected in October. The company plans to add support for chipscale packages later this year. 100,000-unit volume pricing for eX devices will begin at $2.25 for the slowest speed grade eX64 part in a 64-pin TQFP package.
Actel has expanded its low-cost FPGAs with the addition of the 2.5V eX series. The company has had some success with its low-cost 5V MX series, especially in MP3 players. The eX series is targeted at similar Internet-related consumer applications.
The advantages of the antifuse eX device over SRAM-based FPGAs are that they are a single-chip solution and provide design security. Its disadvantage is that it is one-time programmable. The MX and eX series compete with the SRAM-based Spartan family from Xilinx and the ACEX series from Altera.
The eX family is basically a version of Actel's SX-A devices modified to reduce power and lower production costs. In addition, two new devices, the eX64 and eX128, were added at the low-density end. The primary changes were the addition of a power down mode, which is also present in Spartan II parts, and the elimination of the PCI-compliant I/Os.
Like most of Actel's other families, the eX contains different combinatorial and register cells. Like the SX and SX-A, the eX contains twice as many combinatorial as registered cells. The company claims very high performance for the devices with internal speeds of 330MHz and system speeds of 240MHz, nearly the same performance as that for the SX-A.
Actel seems to be concentrating on the very lowest end of the density range. The largest eX device has about the same logic capacity as the smallest devices in the ACEX and Spartan families. Both the ACEX and Spartan families contain embedded memory blocks and the Spartan II devices contain DLLs and I/Os that can be programmed to meet different signaling standards. None of these features are present in the eX family.
The company is targeting CPLDs as well as ASICs for these low-cost applications. It claims comparable performance and lower power dissipation than CPLDs. Benchmarks run by Actel shows that its eX256 consumes half as much power as Xilinx's CoolRunner XCR3256XL at frequencies up to 110MHz.
The eX128 is sampling now and the other two members are expected to be released before the end of the year. Actel also plans to make these parts available in 0.8mm ball pitch BGAs. The first will be an eX256 in a CS180 package, also due to begin sampling before the end of the year.
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