Microchip

Microchip FPGAs

Microchip FPGAs and SoCs are known for several reasons: very high power-efficiency, highest reliability and security and extreme longevity in the market. These key-items make these devices very attractive in industrial, medical and automotive markets. Sometimes Microchip FPGAs and SoCs are still known under the previous brand, Microsemi, which was acquired in 2018. The Microsemi devices date back to Actel which was initially known for supplying one-time programmable FPGAs. At these times Actel and Microsemi were strongly focused on aviation, defense and space which are still important markets. However over the last years devices based on Microchip FPGA technology named PolarFire® have strongly expanded from there.

Power efficiency relates to lower self-heating of devices and with that the typical FPGA-design using Microchip is working without heatsinks or fans. This is also true when doing designs using the integrated high-speed transceivers. These range up to 12.7 Gbps and allow to e.g. run 10GBE with a power-footprint of only 90mW for the transceivers.

Due to the non-obsolescence practice of Microchip devices from the last Millenium are still available for the market. Products recommended for new designs are the PolarFire FPGAs and SoCs. These devices range between 25 kLE and 500 kLE. PolarFire SoC with its quad-core 64 bit application processor was the first hardened RISC-V FPGA-device in the market and natively supports asymmetric multiprocessing between rich operating systems like e.g. Linux and real-time operating systems.

Also still recommended for smaller designs are IGLOO®2 FPGAs and SmartFusion®2 SoCs (based on an M3 microcontroller), ranging from approximately 6kLE to 150 kLE.

ALSE

At ALSE, very long ago, our first practical Actel project used an anti-fuse Actel 1200XL, followed by some larger anti-fuse FPGAs (3200DX) for avionics projects. Using Anti-fuse FPGAs (which can only be programmed once) is a good school teaching you to do things right the first time and to verify your design exhaustively !

Later, we used many other families including :

  • The low power and in-site Flash reprogrammable ProAsic variants.
  • The small and efficient Igloo nano families, which we still occasionally use in some specific projects that require small footprint and low power.

ALSE has ported end 2023 several IPs to the Polarfire family :

In 2024, ALSE became a Microchip partner.

Don’t miss our Webinar !

On May 14th, ALSE will deliver a webinar organized by Microchip.

You will discover the technology behind Transceivers, how they work and how our Aurora IPs use them.

Check the Microchip FPGA Website to register.

Note : Reference designs are available for our Aurora IPs on the Polarfire FPGA Evaluation kit.

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