New prototype board targets low power and high-security applications

Aldec, Inc has extended its TySOM family of embedded prototyping boards with the new TySOM-M-MPFS250, the first in a planned series to feature a Microchip PolarFire SoC FPGA MPFS250T-FCG1152 and to possess dual FMC connectivity.

Microchip’s PolarFire SoC FPGA offers low power consumption, excellent thermal efficiency and defence-grade security for smart, connected systems. It is also proclaimed as the first SoC FPGA to offer a coherent RISC-V CPU cluster and a deterministic L2 memory subsystem and can run Linux and real-time applications.

In terms of board memory, the new device contains 16Gb FPGA DDR4 x32, 16Gb MSS DDR4 x36 with ECC, eMMC, SPI Flash memory, 64Kb EEPROM and a microSD card socket. As well as the dual FMC connectivity, there are 2x Ethernet 10/100/1000, 1x USB 2.0, a USB to UART bridge, a PCIe x4 Gen2 root, CAN and HDMI OUT interfaces for external communications.

“Microchip PolarFire SoC FPGA devices are the lowest power, multi-core SoC FPGAs on the market,” comments Krishnakumar R, product marketing and Mi-V ecosystem manager at Microchip Technology. “PolarFire SoC FPGAs also enable triple-layer security that protects the hardware, design and data, plus each processor core has physical memory protection to enforce access restrictions depending on the machine’s privilege state. Aldec’s decision to use PolarFire SoC FPGA in its new TySOM-M family will enable users to design for a wealth of applications requiring low power and high security.”

Zibi Zalewski, general manager of Aldec’s Hardware Division, adds: “Our TySOM-M debut board inherits all the features and benefits of the PolarFire SoC FPGA. These, combined with the board’s own features and benefits, provide engineers with a highly versatile platform for developing applications that will cost less than if they were to target ARM cores. Also, the board’s ability to connect to two FMC daughter cards means it can be used in virtually any industry sector without having to develop custom hardware. This really is a powerful plug-and-play solution.”