A development kit for the highest density member of Actel's SmartFusion intelligent mixed signal FPGA family is now available. The A2F500 development kit includes the A2F500M3G-FGG484 FPGA and Ethernet, EtherCAT, CAN, RS485, I2C, SPI and UART interfaces. A mixed signal and digital expansion header connects application daughterboards. The kit is supported by the company's Libero IDE (integrated dsign environment), which includes SoftConsole Eclipse-based embedded software development environment. The SmartFusion A2F500 devices have 500k system gates, a hard 100MHz 32bit ARM Cortex-M3-based microcontroller subsystem with 512Mbyte of embedded flash and 64kbyte of SRAM. The programmable analogue blocks of the FPGAs now include three ADCs and three DACs, 10 comparators. The SmartFusion series integrates an FPGA, hard ARM Cortex-M3-based microcontroller subsystem and programmable analogue, for customisation and IP protection. Hardware and embedded designers can create an SoC, says the company, using the FPGA which has more flexibility than traditional fixed-function microcontrollers and without the cost of soft processor cores on traditional FPGAs.
