Actel Launches Family

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- Further extending its industry-leading portfolio of low-power programmable solutions, Actel Corporation today introduced the ProASIC3L family of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) for designers of high-performance, power-conscious systems. Featuring 40 percent lower dynamic power and 90 percent lower static power than its previous-generation ProASIC3 FPGAs, the new flash-based family combines dramatically reduced power consumption with up to 350MHz operation. As a result, designers in high-performance market segments, such as industrial, medical and scientific, now have access to flexible, feature-rich solutions that offer speed, low power and low cost. The ProASIC3L family also supports the free implementation of an FPGA-optimized 32-bit ARM Cortex-M1 processor, allowing system designers to select the Actel flash-based FPGA solution that best meets their speed and power design requirements regardless of application or volume.

"The importance of power consumption is not a question, but a statement of fact," said Fares Mubarak, senior vice president at Actel. "As process technology nodes shrank, static power became a major concern. However, over the past few years, Actel has dramatically reduced static power dissipation, allowing us to intensify our focus on dynamic power, which now accounts for a larger portion of the power budget. Actel's new ProASIC3L family offers the unique combination of low dynamic and static dynamic power with high performance."

Dynamic power is critical in applications where clocks are constantly switching and providing input to an FPGA, such as high-speed data pipelines for portable video and medical appliances. Like the company's award-winning

5-microwatt IGLOO FPGA family, the ProASIC3L devices support a 1.2V core voltage and Actel's innovative Flash*Freeze technology. Flash*Freeze enables designers to quickly switch the device from dynamic operation to static without switching off clocks or power supplies. In a typical high-speed design using comparable one-million gate FPGAs, SRAM-based competitive solutions consume 60 percent higher dynamic power and 100 times more static power than the ProASIC3L devices, which consume just 100mA of dynamic power and 1mW of static power.

Actel Corp.