The platform is intended to significantly improve system performance and reduce power consumption in power-sensitive space, terrestrial, industrial and edge computing applications.
The ORC5000 ASIC platform has been applied to develop Orca’s first ASIC product, the ORC5990, designed for use in low-Earth orbit (LEO) IoT satellite payload and terrestrial IoT gateway designs. According to the company, its custom ASIC design and integration capabilities means that it is able to offer 10x performance enhancements when compared to conventional FPGA-based system design along with only a fraction of the power consumption.
Orca Systems’ technology assets in the RF, analogue, DSP and power management domains serve as building blocks and key elements of the ORC5000 ASIC platform and have enabled the company to build custom ASIC and RF SoC solutions that are able to precisely meet customer performance/power/area needs.
Orca ASICs are extremely energy efficient by design, making them suitable to meet the stringent energy budgets of power-sensitive applications.
“Conventional implementations using discrete components or FPGAs are not optimised to meet the application-specific needs of today’s low-power system designs, resulting in higher power consumption and costly overhead and features,” said John McDonough, CEO of Orca Systems. “Orca Systems has the custom ASIC and RF SoC design expertise to address our customers’ performance, power and board area requirements and deliver solutions that significantly reduce total cost of ownership. Our design capabilities also include development and integration of complex RF, analogue and digital IP from our partners and customers.”
The ORC5000 ASIC platform, based on the GF 22FDX platform, has significant advantages for use in LEO satellite payloads due to its low power consumption and low susceptibility to latch-up and single event effects (SEE). The platform also uses GF’s eMRAM technology in the application CPU subsystem, which enables low power and reduced soft-error rate and improves reliability for satellite communications.
The ORC5000 ASIC’s highly integrated design is also said to achieve significant improvements in power consumption for a wide range of applications.
The ASIC platform is designed for highly complex, multi-channel modem and signal processor integration and supports an internal PHY for access to large external LPDDR4x memory for samples or other large data set storage tasks. The LPDDR4x PHY with low-voltage operation enables low power consumption, which is critical for power-sensitive designs.
A flexible serial peripheral interface (SPI) enables gigabit data throughput with an external microcontroller or external flash memory. The platform also supports mixed-signal integration including an analogue PLL for generating high-speed clocks for the DDR PHY, high-speed digital circuits and other peripherals.
Depending on the custom design requirements, power management circuits (e.g. DC-DC convertors and LDOs), memories (e.g. NVM and SRAM) and peripheral interfaces such as UART and USB can be integrated into the ORC5000 ASIC platform.
The low-power ORC5000 ASIC platform supports an ambient industrial temperature range of -40 °C to +85 °C and enables system cost savings, efficient power system design, and reduced peripherical component count and PCB area.
