MORE ABOUT FPGA

This is a submission from Lattice Semiconductor on its new low power FPGA platform, Lattice Nexus™. The platform is architected to deliver power-efficient performance that will benefit developers of a wide range of applications, including AI for IoT, video, hardware security, embedded vision, 5G infrastructure and industrial/automotive automation.

This is a submission from Lattice Semiconductor on the latest version of its popular software design tool for FPGAs, Lattice Radiant™ 2.0. In addition to adding support for higher density devices like the new CrossLink-NX™ FPGA family, the updated design tool also offers new features that make it faster and easier than ever to develop Lattice FPGA-based designs.

This is a submission from Lattice Semiconductor on the first FPGA developed on its new Lattice Nexus™ FPGA platform, CrossLink-NX™. This new FPGA provides the low power, small form factor, reliability, and performance that developers need to create innovative embedded vision and AI solutions for communications, compute, industrial, automotive, and consumer systems.

This is a submission from Microchip on the RT PolarFire FPGA that is optimised to meet the most demanding requirements in spacecraft payload systems’ high-speed data paths with the lowest possible power consumption and heat generation.

The SmartScope is an especially handy and affordable USB oscilloscope, logic analyzer and signal generator. Internally the SmartScope is built around a powerful Xilinx Spartan 6 FPGA, which also makes it suitable for use as an FPGA development platform. Elektor is now offering the unique SmartScope Maker Kit, which includes a special version of the SmartScope and two programmers with suitable cables.

Xilinx has announced what it claims to be the world's largest FPGA device. With a total of 35 billion transistors, the VU19P offers the highest logic density and I/O number of any single device ever manufactured.

The new Arduino MKR VIDOR 4000 board is available in the Elektor Store. With an Intel 10CL016 FPGA. That’s 16 000 logic elements plus some specialised signal processing embedded multipliers (read: audio and video). The board, at 83 x 25 mm (3.3 x 1 inches) is as full as an egg. In addition to standard GPIOs, there are HDMI, USB, JST and MIPI (Camera) connectors. And let’s not forget the ARM ATSAMD21 32-bit microcontroller!

This is an article from Microchip on the new PolarFire™ FPGA imaging and video solution. It delivers capabilities superior to alternative technologies to support resolution as high as 4K in small, low-power form factors necessary for a wide variety of imaging and video applications.

What’s the fuss? ...Like we didn't have Arm technology in FPGAs for decades with the Cortex-A CPU based SoCs? Of course, but that’s the CPU integrated alongside FPGA fabric, rather than within the FPGA fabric. Arm-based FPGA SoCs have shipped in millions, and an example is the Xilinx Zync SoC family. The new development is that Arm DesignStart FPGA brings Cortex-M CPUs to the configurable FPGA fabric so that Arm CPUs are now available across all Xilinx FPGAs.

FPGA development remains a complicated job, but open source and open hardware tools like TinyFPGA manage to make it more accessible. Although still a long way from Arduino-style microcontroller development, they definitely bring FPGAs closer to the people. Let's have a look at the TinyFPGA BX board.