The portable electronics market is experiencing rapid growth driven by the benefits of added convenience and increased productivity. Portable electronics design is becoming more challenging as new product revisions require additional features and improved performance while demand for longer battery life increases. These demands in the portable market include low active and static power consumption, ultra-low power mode support, small footprint packages, higher integration, and low cost.

Actel offers the optimal solution for your portable design with its FPGAs, solutions, and IPs.

Key Benefits

• Extend battery life with Actel's IGLOO devices, the industry's lowest power FPGAs
• Flexible system implementation options allow system power reduction
• Small-footprint packages help minimize board size (as small as 3x3 mm)
• Single-chip implementation offers lowest total system cost
• Secure in-system programmability protects your intellectual property
• Wide range of feature-rich devices and low-power turnkey solutions
• ARM® Cortex™-M1 processor and Fusion mixed-signal FPGA support allows higher integration and system power optimization

Storage

Actel and its partners offer multiple validated and proven IP cores for quickx and easy integration of storage interfaces on flash FPGAs. The ability to support different storage interfaces on the same hardware platform can help target multiple markets by simply changing the FPGA configuration.
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Display and Imaging

Many LCD types and interfaces are used in portable electronics to meet preference and price, placing a challenge on the design, which needs to support all types of displays using a modular board. Many display and imaging interfaces can be implemented using low-power reprogrammable FPGAs, allowing interaction with multiple types of LCDs by changing only the FPGA configuration. Furthermore, timing control and image manipulations can be implemented on the same FPGA and modified as needed.  » Learn More

Human Machine Interface (HMI) Control

In newer portable devices, HMI interfaces such as alphanumeric or qwerty keypads, touch keypad/displays with white or color LED backlighting, programmable keys/switches, joysticks, scroll wheels, and buzzers/speakers are becoming more and more prevalent. For a hardware designer of a portable application, the rapidly changing requirements for HMIs, small form factors, and low-power designs pose significant challenges. Actel's line of ultra-low-power, reprogrammable flash FPGAs provides solutions to address these challenges.   » Learn More

Miniature Motor Control

Many portable devices use miniature motors/actuators. Small examples of brushed and brushless motors that are used in portable devices include infusion and volumetric pumps in medical devices. Stepper motors, servo motors, and actuators are also used in many portable applications that require precise movement. For a hardware designer of a portable application having motors/actuators, Actel's ultra-low power, reprogrammable flash FPGAs provide a low-cost and flexible motor control solution.  » Learn More

Technology Solutions
	Offering the industry's lowest power programmable, IGLOO ultra-low power FPGAs are the only low-power FPGA solution to support 1.2 V core operation extending the battery life more than 10x compared to other devices. » More
Small Footprint Packages	Actel supports a variety of small footprint packages as small as 3x3 mm, which allow high I/O density in a minimal board space.
	Actel's flash FPGAs are single chip and single voltage and do not require additional components for proper FPGA operation.
	The flash FPGA configuration cannot be read back or exposed, which secures the company's IP, brand, and business. Actel flash FPGAs support secured In-System Programmability (ISP) features that help implement secure remote-field upgrade and up-sell changes. » More
	Flash FPGAs are already configured at power-up, which results in immediate system operation, as the device helps in system supervisory tasks. The IGLOO FPGA's ability to enter and exit Flash*Freeze mode within 1 µs provides immediate power savings with rapid wake-up on user demand. » More
Lowest Unit and Total System Cost	The integration of high-end features in a single-chip flash-based FPGA fabricated on an advanced process geometry leads to low unit cost and the lowest total system cost compared to other PLDs. » More
System Management	ARM-enabled IGLOO and Fusion devices allow for cost-effective system power and thermal management by controlling and monitoring power supplies for total system power considerations at the board level. » More
Flexible Implementation	The Flash*Freeze technology used in IGLOO devices enables easy entry and exit from ultra-low power mode, which consumes as little as 5 µW, while retaining SRAM and register data.
Feature-Rich	Reprogrammable FPGAs offers a variety of logic densities and features, such as PLL, RAM, and user nonvolatile memory, which help get designs to market on time.

Intellectual Property

Actel offers a range of IP cores for the development of portable applications, including the new ARM Cortex-M1 FPGA processor. These flexible cores can be implemented in either Verilog or VHDL and are available for free in the Libero IDE catalog or CoreConsole. » Search for Portable IP cores.

Actel Comprehensive Power Analysis Tools

Actel provides accurate, comprehensive power analysis tools for its FPGAs and offers accurate prediction that gives straightforward analysis of design options to help meet your portable system needs. The pre-netlist Power Calculator tool helps in analyzing design implementation options for rapid power analysis scenarios and design partitioning. The netlist-based SmartPower tool can help in quickly managing and optimizing portable design to the product's lowest power capabilities. This power analysis tool provides a comprehensive interface to easily realize the static power performance of the portable design. Power reports are broken down by net, gate, I/O, memory, clock, core static, instance, and power rail. A design-level power summary includes average switching activity, ambient temperature, and junction temperature readings, offering the ability to optimize FPGA power and behavior to reduce total system power.

Learn more about Libero IDE flows and tools.

Actel Hardware Platforms

Actel and its partners offer a variety of development and evaluation platforms to allow quick and easy portable design. Actel's IGLOO Starter Kit demonstrates the low-power capabilities of the device, including low-power static, active, and Flash*Freeze mode operation. The starter kit also has the ability to operate the IGLOO device with 1.2 V or 1.5 V.

In addition, Actel and its partners provide several hardware platforms to evaluate common interfaces used in portable electronics and integrate proven IP cores into their final design. These platforms offer the benefits of rapid prototyping, rapid time-to-market, and reduced design time and costs.

For IGLOO-related documents, visit the IGLOO Documentation page.

Product Information Brochures (PIB)

	Power-Smart Storage Solutions Brochure		727 KB	9/2007	Click on the to rate this document
	IGLOO Low-Power Flash FPGAs Brochure		584 KB	11/2008	Click on the to rate this document
	Industry's Lowest Power FPGAs Fact Sheet		147 KB	10/2008	Click on the to rate this document
	Solutions for the Portable Market Brochure		703 KB	10/2008	Click on the to rate this document
	Power Top Ten		177 KB	10/2008	Click on the to rate this document
	Total System Power Brochure		493 KB	10/2008	Click on the to rate this document

Selector Guides

Actel FPGA Package and Selector Guide

937 KB

11/2008

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White Papers

	Competitive Programmable Logic Power Comparison White Paper			4/2008	Click on the to rate this document
	Incredible Shrinking Medical Devices White Paper		397 KB	10/2008	Click on the to rate this document
	Reducing System Power White Paper		34 KB	8/2006	Click on the to rate this document
	The Many Flavors of Low-Power, Low-Cost FPGAs White Paper		529 KB	4/2008	Click on the to rate this document
	The New "Power-Smart" Power Paradigm White Paper		216 KB	7/2007	Click on the to rate this document