Devices accelerate customer innovation in smartphones and IoT Edge applications

Lattice Semiconductor announced its new iCE40 UltraPlus FPGA devices, one of the industry’s most energy-efficient and programmable mobile heterogeneous computing (MHC) solutions. This latest addition to the family delivers eight times more memory (1.1Mbit RAM), twice the digital signal processors (8x DSPs), and improved I/Os over previous generations. Available in multiple package sizes, the programmable nature of the device is ideal for smartphones, wearables, drones, 360 cameras, human-machine interfaces (HMIs) and industrial automation, as well as security and surveillance products. Enabling a new way to interact with electronic devices, the device is well suited for voice recognition, gesture recognition, image recognition, haptics, graphics acceleration, signal aggregation, I3C bridging and more. This brings added intelligence to smartphones and IoT edge products, such as wearables and home audio assisted devices, to be always on, always listening and ready to instantly process commands locally without going to the cloud. The MHC paradigm is concentrated around a highly energy-efficient method for computing algorithms quickly and locally using dissimilar processors to offload power hungry application processors (APs) in battery-powered devices. More DSPs offer the ability to compute higher-quality algorithms, while increased memory allows data to be buffered for longer low-power states. The flexible I/Os enable a more distributed heterogeneous processing architecture. This combination provides flexibility to enable OEMs and the Maker market to quickly deliver key innovations, such as always on sensor buffers and acoustic beam forming. Imagine interacting with your mobile product, but without ever touching it. The device will enable the responsiveness required to deliver this functionality. “Distributed processing demands are increasing in mobile applications and Lattice’s iCE40 UltraPlus is optimized to address these requirements. As the newest addition to our successful iCE40 Ultra™ product family, the iCE40 UltraPlus FPGAs expand its market reach to system designers who require FPGA functionality with improved DSP compute power, more I/Os and increased memory for buffering,” said C.H. Chee, senior director of marketing, mobile and consumer division at Lattice Semiconductor. “Our solution will reduce design complexity, system power consumption and time-to-market, while enhancing responsiveness of tomorrow’s mobile devices.”