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Low Power Processing
Actel Igloo Meets ARM Cortex M1
Last week, in “ARM and Altera – Why You Should Care,” we looked at the announcement of an Altera Cyclone III development kit for the ARM Cortex M1 soft-core processor. We discussed ARM’s quiet conquest of the market for embedded computing with FPGAs and how the Cyclone III announcement moved the IP core from niche player to mainstream programmable logic platform. This week, we discuss Actel’s announcement of a focus on handheld and portable applications. As we discussed in our “Battery-Powered Proof” feature two weeks ago, FPGAs have not been long known as good citizens in battery-powered parts communities, and the idea of an FPGA playing a central role in a portable or handheld device is a new concept indeed.
In the world of portable devices, the requirements are vastly different from programmable logic’s traditional strengths. Portables demand extremely low power, flexible power management capabilities, very small footprints, low cost (due to typically high volumes and therefore high BOM cost sensitivity), and high performance. While the flexibility and time-to-market advantages of FPGAs can be enormous, poor performance in the previous categories has long been a substantial barrier to their adoption in portables.
Actel announced a new “Focus of Power and Portable” strategy this week, attempting to break the public perception on portable processing with FPGAs. The centerpiece of this announcement is the unveiling of a version of the company’s ultra-low-power Igloo family with ARM’s new Cortex M1 FPGA-optimized processor core. The availability of an embedded-computing-platform-class FPGA with power consumption and footprint specs such as Igloo’s are likely to spawn significant interest among designers of power-sensitive portable systems. With the traditional road blocks removed, the compelling advantages of in-system reprogrammability, rapid design turnaround, and lack of NRE could win a bevy of sockets for the new family – especially given the perceived safety of designing an embedded system around an ARM-architecture processor. [more]
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