Actel has released SmartFusion, claimed to be the world's first intelligent mixed-signal FPGA. The devices feature the company's FPGA fabric, a microcontroller sub-system built around a hard ARM Cortex-M3 processor, with its access to ARM partners' tools, software and middleware; and programmable analogue blocks on a flash process. The processor runs at 100MHz and has a multi-layer AHB communications matrix with up to 16Gbit/s throughput and a 10/100 Ethernet MAC with RMII. There are two SPI, two I2C, two UARTs, and two 32bit timers as well as up to 512kbyte flash memory and 64kbyte SRAM and an external memory controller. There is also an eight-channel DMA controller. The proprietary analogue compute engine performas sample sequencing and computation which offloads the processor from analogue initialisation and processing. The ADCs and DACs have 1% accuracy and there are up to three 12bit ADCs available with up to 600ksample/s. There are up to three 12bit first order signma delta DACs and up to 10 50ns comparators. There are also multiple, integrated temperature, voltage and current monitors. The devices are based on the company's ProASIC architecture on a 130nm CMOS process and deliver 350MHz performance and up to 204 I/Os to reduce board space and power consumption of the overall system. There are three devices, the 200k-gate A2F200 is available now. The AF500, 500k-gate device will be available in Q2 and A2F060, 60k-gate device is scheduled for the second half of the year. The devices are supported by Libero IDE v9.0 which includes synthesis, simulation and debug tools as well as SoftConsole Eclipse-based IDE with GNU and evaluation versions of Keil and IAR System.
