Low power cost-optimized FPGA products for wireless infrastructure and industry 4.0 markets

Microsemi Corporation has announced the availability of its new cost-optimized PolarFire field programmable gate array (FPGA) product family, delivering what is claimed to be the industry’s lowest power at mid-range densities with 12.7Gbps Serializer/Deserializer (SerDes) transceivers as well as best-in-class security and reliability. The FPGA product family is ideal for a wide range of applications within wireline access networks and cellular infrastructure, defense and commercial aviation markets, as well as industry 4.0 which includes the industrial automation and IoT 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 10Gpbs transceivers—thus delivering the differentiation necessary to cater to our customers’ ever-evolving requirements and simultaneously filling a void in the market.” 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, 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.”