Lattice shrinks size of automotive-qualified FPGA
Among the advantages claimed for the latest Certus-NX FPGAs, Lattice Semiconductor lists a smaller form factor and faster configuration to simplify safety-critical design.
The AEC-Q100-qualified Certus-NX Auto is the smallest FPGA supporting AES-256 encryption with elliptic curve digital signature algorithm (ECDSA) available today, confirmed Lattice.
The latest additions to the Lattice Certus-NX FPGA family are optimised for safety-focused applications. They can be used in motor control, LED control in in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) systems, in-vehicle networking (IVN), and sensor data co-processing in ADAS applications.
Built on the Lattice Nexus platform, they combine automotive-grade features with best-in-class I/O density, power efficiency, small size, reliability, instant-on performance, and support for fast PCI Express (PCIe) and Gigabit Ethernet interfaces.
Power consumption is up to four times lower than similar FPGAs, with a programmable back bias that enables user-selectable high performance or low power operating modes, depending on the needs of the application.
The small form factor – up to three times smaller than competing FPGAs and has up to two times the I/O density per mm2 in comparison to similar, competing FPGAs, Lattice reported.
They have instant-on performance, with fast device configuration from SPI memory which is up to 12X faster than similar competing FPGAs. Individual I/Os are able to configure in just three milliseconds, and full-device start-up in eight to 14 milliseconds, depending on device capacity.
I/O interfacing capability via Lattice’s extensive Certus-NX I/O IP library includes 1.5Gbits per second differential I/O with performance up to 70 per cent higher than competing FPGAs, 5Gbits per second PCIe, 1.5Gbits per second serial gigabit media-independent interface (SGMII) and 1066Mbits per second DDR3.
Certus-NX FPGAs are AEC-Q100 qualified and provide up to 100X better soft-error rate (SER) performance than similar FPGAs, said Lattice.
To protect bitstreams, they support AES-256 encryption with ECDSA and are believed to be the smallest FPGAs on the market to support ECDSA to date.
Lattice Radiant and Lattice Propel software tools are available to simplify and accelerate automotive system design. Certus-NX FPGAs are also supported by the Lattice mVision and Lattice sensAI solution stacks so designers can leverage the stacks’ modular hardware platforms, reference designs, neural network IP cores, and custom design services to accelerate automotive vision system design.
Automotive-grade versions of Certus-NX FPGAs are now sampling with select customers.
