Microsemi intros SmartFusion2 advanced development kit

ALISO VIEJO, USA: Microsemi Corp. announced the availability of the company's new largest density, lowest power SmartFusion2 150K LE System-on-Chip (SoC) FPGA Advanced Development Kit.

Board-level designers and system architects can quickly develop system-level designs by using the two FPGA Mezzanine Card (FMC) expansion headers to connect a wide range of new functions with off-the-shelf daughter cards, which significantly reduces design time and cost when creating new applications for communications, industrial, defense and aerospace markets.

"Microsemi's new SmartFusion2 150K LE Advanced Development Kit is ideal for designers developing low power, high security and highly reliable SoC applications," said Shakeel Peera, senior director of product line marketing at Microsemi.

"With our largest density 150K LE device onboard, the development kit will enable customers to design applications for the complete SmartFusion2 family. Additionally, designers can accelerate their time-to-market and reduce development costs for high density designs by leveraging the two industry-standard FMC headers to develop or access pre-designed functional blocks on off-the-shelf daughter cards."

The new SmartFusion2 SoC FPGA Advanced Development Kit offers a full featured 150K LE device SmartFusion2 SoC FPGA. This industry-leading low power 150K LE device inherently integrates reliable flash-based FPGA fabric, a 166 MHz Cortex M3 processor, digital signal processing (DSP) blocks, static random-access memory (SRAM), embedded nonvolatile memory (eNVM) and industry-required high-performance communication interfaces—all on a single chip.

Microsemi estimates its market for FPGAs to be around $2.5 billion. This is based on estimates garnered from iSuppli and competitive financial reports which report on revenue for individual product families.

The new FMC headers provide designers additional cost savings, the ability to accelerate design development, and helps significantly reduce time-to-market on designs by providing the opportunity to leverage a wide range of standard off-the-shelf daughter cards for applications such as image and video processing, serial connectivity (SATA/SAS, SFP, SDI) and analog (A/D, D/A).

The release of this kit also complements Microsemi's expertise and IP in JESD204B, supporting the growing enterprise market for high speed data conversion for applications such as radar, satellite, broadband communications and communications test equipment.