“For the first time, we can offer a non-volatile FPGA that features 10Gbit/s transceivers and which provides tangible power and cost benefits over SRAM FPGAs,” said Bruce Meyer, vice president and business unit manager at Microsemi.
Manufactured using a 28nm silicon-oxide-nitride-oxide-silicon (SONOS) non-volatile process on standard CMOS technology, the PolarFire range is looking to address cyber security threats, as well as reliability concerns faced by deep submicron SRAM-based FPGAs; particularly single event upsets in configuration memory.
Alongside transceivers optimised for 12.7Gbit/s, the device offers hardened I/O gearing logic for DDR memory and LVDS, high performance security IP and, according to the company, is the only mid-range device capable of clock and data recovery at 1.6Gbit/s.
With Cryptography Research’s differential power analysis bitstream protection technology, an integrated physically unclonable function and 56kbyte of secure embedded non-volatile memory, the parts also feature built-in tamper detectors and countermeasures.
Four devices are planned, with capacities of 109k, 192k, 300k and 481k four input LUTs. The 300k LUT device is planned for general availability towards the middle of 2017.
