Microsemi Unveils Industry's Lowest Power Cost-Optimized FPGA Product Family for Access Networks, Wireless Infrastructure, Defense and Industry 4.0 Markets

"Our new FPGA product family transforms the way the market thinks about traditional mid-range FPGAs," said Bruce Weyer, vice president and business unit manager at Microsemi. "For the first time a non-volatile FPGA, with all its known benefits, provides tangible power and cost benefits over SRAM FPGAs that feature 10 Gpbs transceivers—thus delivering the differentiation necessary to cater to our customers' ever-evolving requirements and simultaneously filling a void in the market."

Microsemi's PolarFire FPGAs enable the company to increase its FPGA addressable market to over $2.5 billion covering both the low end and mid-range FPGA market segments. In addition, the innovative features of the new product family support Microsemi's continued growth within the communications infrastructure market.

Today's cellular infrastructure and wireline access networks are facing a rapid transformation, having to deliver terabytes of high value content to consumers while reducing operational and capital expenditure spend, as well as reducing their thermal and carbon footprint. Microsemi's PolarFire FPGAs provide cost-effective bandwidth processing capabilities for the increasing number of converged 10 Gpbs ports with the lowest power footprint. The new FPGA product family also addresses the market's growing concerns over tangible cyber security threats as well as reliability concerns that face deep submicron SRAM-based FPGAs as they relate to single event upsets (SEUs) in their configuration memory.

The new devices are ideal for a number of applications within the communications market, including wireline access, network edge, metro (1-40G); wireless heterogeneous networks, wireless backhaul, smart optical modules and video broadcasting. The devices are also well-suited to applications within the defense and aerospace market, such as encryption and root of trust, secure wireless communications, radar and electronic warfare (EW), aircraft networking, actuation and control. Ideal applications for the FPGAs within the industrial market include process control and automation, machine vision processing and analytics, programmable logic controllers, industrial networking, and video and image processing.

"PolarFire FPGAs enable customers to forego purchasing FPGAs with higher power and cost to obtain the 12.7G transceiver performance required for many mid bandwidth applications, while extending the benefits of our ultralow power, high reliability and high security," said Shakeel Peera, senior director, SoC product marketing at Microsemi. "Combining the availability of the cost-effective PolarFire FPGAs with Microsemi's broad  portfolio of application-specific standard products (ASSPs) enables end-to-end solutions in timing, voice processing, storage, Optical Transport Network (OTN) switching and transport, and power management across multiple market segments."  

Microsemi has been actively engaged with select customers in its Early Access Program, and adoption of the product family has already begun.

"In addition to developing leading-edge video compression, communication, test and measurement, networking and consumer products, A2e Technologies also supplies related intellectual property (IP) and design services to Microsemi's customer base," said Allen Vexler, CTO of A2e Technologies. "The promise of getting an FPGA from Microsemi with higher performance signal processing and input/output (I/O) capabilities at very low power consumption changes the way we think about developing streaming video products for surveillance, drones and DVRs―and it opens up a whole range of new possibilities."

Key Features & Benefits

In collaboration with Silicon Creations, Microsemi has developed a 12.7 Gbps transceiver fully optimized to be area efficient and low power, resulting in total power of less than 90 milliwatts (mWs) at 10 Gbps. With best-in-class low device static power of 34 mW at 100K logic elements (LEs), zero inrush current and unique Flash*Freeze mode for best-in-class standby power of 15 mWs at 25 degrees C, PolarFire devices are up to 50 percent lower power than competing FPGAs for the same application. Microsemi also provides customers with a power estimator to analyze power consumption of their designs. After implementation, the SmartPower Analyzer can be used to access full design power.

The FPGA family also provides the industry's best reliability with its inherent immunity to configuration SEUs. Additional features to aid with reliability include built-in single error correction and double error detection (SECDED) as well as memory interleaving on large static random access memory (LSRAMs), and system controller suspend mode for safety critical designs.

Leveraging Microsemi's expertise in security, PolarFire FPGAs offer Cryptography Research Incorporated (CRI) patented differential power analysis (DPA) bitstream protection, integrated physically unclonable function (PUF), 56 KB of secure embedded non-volatile memory (eNVM), built-in tamper detectors and countermeasures, true random number generators, integrated Athena TeraFire EXP5200B Crypto Co-processors (Suite B capable) and a CRI DPA countermeasures pass-through license.

The devices' cost-optimized architecture uses 28 nanometer (nm) Silicon-Oxide-Nitride-Oxide-Silicon (SONOS) non-volatile process technology on standard complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS). PolarFire FPGAs also incorporate transceiver performance optimized for 12.7 Gbps enabling smaller size and lowest power, hardened I/O gearing logic for double date rate (DDR) memory and low-voltage differential signaling (LVDS), high performance security IP and the industry's only low cost mid-range device with clock and data recovery (CDR) capable 1.6 Gbps I/Os.

Software and IP

Microsemi's Libero SoC Design Suite offers high productivity with its comprehensive, easy to learn, easy to adopt development tools for designing with the company's cost-optimized PolarFire FPGAs. The suite includes a complete design flow with Synopsys Synplify Pro synthesis and Mentor Graphics ModelSim Pro mixed-language simulation with best-in-class constraints management, and Microsemi's differentiated FPGA debugging suite, SmartDebug. Popular IP solutions for 1G Ethernet, 10G Ethernet, JESD204B, DDR memory interfaces, AXI4 interconnect IPs and others are available for use with PolarFire devices.  

Other PolarFire Key Features        

• High-speed serial connectivity with built-in multi-gigabit multi-protocol transceivers from 250 Mbps to 12.7 Gbps
• Up to 481K logic elements consisting of a four-input look-up table (LUT) with a fracture-able D-type flip-flop
• Up to 33 MBs of RAM
• Up to 1480 18 x 18 multiply accumulate blocks with hardened pre-adders 
• Integrated dual PCIe for up to x4 Gen2 endpoint (EP) and root port (RP) designs
• High-speed I/O (HSIO) supporting up to 1600 Mbps DDR4, 1333 Mbps DDR3L and 1333 Mbps LPDDR3/DDR3 memories with integrated I/O gearing
• General purpose I/O (GPIO) supporting 3.3 volts (V), built-in clock and data recovery (CDR) for serial gigabit Ethernet (SGMII), 1067 Mbps DDR3 and 1600 Mbps low-voltage differential signaling (LVDS) I/O speed with integrated I/O gearing logic

Product Availability

Microsemi's PolarFire FPGA product family is shipping to early access customers now and samples for general availability will be offered in the second quarter of 2017. Orders for samples can be placed immediately. For more information, visit www.microsemi.com/polarfire or contact [email protected].

About Microsemi

Microsemi Corporation (Nasdaq: MSCC) offers a comprehensive portfolio of semiconductor and system solutions for aerospace & defense, communications, data center and industrial markets. Products include high-performance and radiation-hardened analog mixed-signal integrated circuits, FPGAs, SoCs and ASICs; power management products; timing and synchronization devices and precise time solutions, setting the world's standard for time; voice processing devices; RF solutions; discrete components; enterprise storage and communication solutions, security technologies and scalable anti-tamper products; Ethernet solutions; Power-over-Ethernet ICs and midspans; as well as custom design capabilities and services. Microsemi is headquartered in Aliso Viejo, California and has approximately 4,800 employees globally. Learn more at www.microsemi.com.

Microsemi and the Microsemi logo are registered trademarks or service marks of Microsemi Corporation and/or its affiliates. Third-party trademarks and service marks mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners.

"Safe Harbor" Statement under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995: Any statements set forth in this news release that are not entirely historical and factual in nature, including without limitation statements related to the availability of its new cost-optimized PolarFire™ field programmable gate array (FPGA) product family, delivering the industry's lowest power at mid-range densities with 12.7 Gbps Serializer/Deserializer (SerDes) transceivers as well as best-in-class security and reliability, and its potential effects on future business, are forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are based on our current expectations and are inherently subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed in the forward-looking statements. The potential risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, such factors as rapidly changing technology and product obsolescence, potential cost increases, variations in customer order preferences, weakness or competitive pricing environment of the marketplace, uncertain demand for and acceptance of the company's products, adverse circumstances in any of our end markets, results of in-process or planned development or marketing and promotional campaigns, difficulties foreseeing future demand, potential non-realization of expected orders or non-realization of backlog, product returns, product liability, and other potential unexpected business and economic conditions or adverse changes in current or expected industry conditions, difficulties and costs in implementing the company's acquisitions and divestitures strategy or integrating acquired companies, uncertainty as to the future profitability of acquired businesses and realization of accretion from acquisition transactions, difficulties and costs of protecting patents and other proprietary rights, inventory obsolescence and difficulties regarding customer qualification of products. In addition to these factors and any other factors mentioned elsewhere in this news release, the reader should refer as well to the factors, uncertainties or risks identified in the company's most recent Form 10-K and all subsequent Form 10-Q reports filed by Microsemi with the SEC. Additional risk factors may be identified from time to time in Microsemi's future filings. The forward-looking statements included in this release speak only as of the date hereof, and Microsemi does not undertake any obligation to update these forward-looking statements to reflect subsequent events or circumstances.

SOURCE Microsemi Corporation

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