FROM EDN EUROPE: Actel adds ARM7 to S-o-FPGA offering
by Graham Prophet -- EDN, May 12, 2005
If you are using, or will use in the coming months or years, a complex FPGA chip, the chances are increasing that you will use a processor core on that FPGA. A range of both "hard" and "soft" processor core options has been available for some time. For example, some Xilinx Virtex parts carry Power PC cores as diffused ("hard") blocks on the silicon; Altera offers its Nios proprietary core as a "soft-coded" option, i.e. as optimised code to place the core in the programmable logic; and so on. But the most popular soft core in use today—the ARM architecture—has not been available from a programmable logic vendor. With a licensing agreement between ARM and Actel, the ARM7 core now becomes available as a licence-free product from Actel, as one of its range of IP cores for the ProASIC 3 device family.
The core used is the ARM7 v4T ("Thumb") architecture, a 32/16 bit fully static designs that uses the Thumb compressed instruction set; it will come with a version of the ARM RealView development system fully integrated into the Actel FPGA tool chain. There will be three price and performance options for the development system, ranging from "evaluation" to "optimised".
Users will not need to have a licence agreement with ARM; the security features in the ProASIC range protect the ARM IP. ProASIC 3 has the option of a 128-bit encryption key that Actel or a user sets on a batch or even a per-chip basis. Configuration files to set up the logic in the device are encrypted, and are decoded on-chip, and only those files intended for a given chip or batch or chips will provide the required functions. The ProASIC3 parts are flash-based, so no configuration files need to be stored in the finished product, and instant-on performance can be provided. On-chip performance is quoted as being up to 350 MHz operation. Actel will deliver an "ARM-enabled" version of its FPGAs to support the processor cores, with first parts promised later this year.
Actel, +44 1276 401450, www.actel.com
