This tool represents the culmination of three decades of deep domain expertise in designing and shipping programmable logic architectures that are silicon-efficient, reliable, high quality, and manufacturable at scale, implemented using the silicon automation design techniques of the OpenFPGA open-source framework.
Due to severe semiconductor supply constraints and difficulties keeping up with Moore’s Law many system developers have looked to design their own, more domain-specific devices. These tend to be expensive, take longer to develop, and introduce risk. Integration of embedded FPGA technology is a possible solution to mitigate these risks, but historically it had to be “hand-crafted” and tied to a particular foundry and a specific process node.
Australis looks to address these issues by giving developers the ability to customise their eFPGA IP quickly and cost effectively.
Australis is based on the OpenFPGA IP generator and adds a multitude of additional features and capabilities specific to implementing QuickLogic’s eFPGA IP solutions, along with the level of testing and support required to build commercially viable eFPGA IP.
QuickLogic utilises the Australis eFPGA IP Generator to provide ASIC/SoC developers with an easy, highly automated way to define and implement customised eFPGA IP for their projects.
Embedded FPGA flexibility enables a number of reprogrammable use cases – including addressing changing market conditions, supporting the evolution of new standards with the same silicon, customised implementations for intellectual property protection, offloading and hardware acceleration of artificial intelligence / machine learning workloads, or simply for creating a range of product variants for fragmented markets.
“With the release of Australis, we’re underscoring our commitment to and leadership in leveraging open-source tools with our deep domain expertise in programmable logic to deliver embedded FPGA technology to the market,” said Brian Faith, QuickLogic’s president and chief executive officer
