Design services company chooses LatticeXP

Non-volatile FPGA's capacity, power consumption, space saving and cost cited

Lattice Semiconductor Corporation (NASDAQ: LSCC) has today announced that design services firm Oztek Corporation has chosen the LatticeXP FPGA for use in several distinct designs.

"In one case, we designed a power supply for a high-end instrumentation product," said Dave Zendzian, Oztek co-founder and vice president of Engineering.

"The power supply is comprised of 16 dual output cards in the motherboard, as well as a microprocessor".

"The design originally called for a CPLD, but the amount of logic in the design was more than the CPLD could comfortably accommodate".

"We chose to substitute a LatticeXP FPGA for the CPLD.

There are multiple interfaces in the design, including SPI, serial and A/D converters".

"The LatticeXP device provides a seamless bridge to these interfaces, and easily handles the amount of logic required," Zendzian continued.

"We faced a similar challenge in the design of a power control system for a robotics application," said Zendzian.

"Again, logic creep made the use of a CPLD impractical".

"Because the LatticeXP device is non-volatile, it was very easy to migrate the design because the LatticeXP FPGA requires no external boot PROM.

While the design consumed virtually 100% of the CPLD, just 20% of the LatticeXP resources were needed".

"And the cost of the Lattice FPGA was about half that of the CPLD," Zendzian noted.

"Our most recent design, a hand-held, battery-powered instrumentation device, takes full advantage of the LatticeXP FPGA features," said Zendzian.

"The design requires a lot of logic, dual port RAM and PLL features".

"The LatticeXP device is used to implement a UART, a DSP bus interface and instrument control functions".

"Because the device is portable and battery-powered, size and power consumption are critical considerations".

"The LatticeXP FPGA is non-volatile, so it can be shut down to save power using the Sleep mode feature, and boot up takes only milliseconds".

"Non-volatility means a single-chip solution, saving space as well as reducing our design cycle".

"We've also been very pleased with the local Lattice support; Lattice people have been a genuine partner in these designs, and their expertise has been invaluable," Zendzian concluded.

"The LatticeXP device is the only non-volatile FPGA that exploits the full potential of Flash plus SRAM technology," said Stan Kopec, Lattice vice president of marketing.

"That combination makes our LatticeXP devices the only full-featured non-volatile FPGAs that are infinitely reconfigurable and that can be transparently upgraded in the field".

"At the same time, our customers receive the traditional benefits of non-volatility, including high security and a single-chip, space saving solution," Kopec concluded.

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