Tailored PolarFire FPGA and SoC stacks demonstrate intelligent edge focus
IP, reference designs, development kits, application notes and demo guides are collated in 10 stacks offered by Microchip for its PolarFire FPGA and SoC intelligent edge solutions and stacks. The 10 collections span the industrial and communications sectors and smart embedded vision, motor control and optical access technologies.
They have been designed to support designers targeting the intelligent edge, where shrinking market windows, rising costs and risks of new designs need to be balanced with thermal constraints and reliability priorities, together with the need for secure operation and immediate knowledge of special technology and vertical market expertise.
“We’re making it much easier to create industry-leading industrial and communications designs,” said Shakeel Peera, vice president of strategy for Microchip’s FPGA business unit, at the introduction of the mid-range FPGA and SoC support which span the industrial edge, smart embedded vision and edge communications.
The company’s intelligent edge focus is getting significant traction with leading system designers, added Peera, “because they get the full benefit of PolarFire FPGA’s unequalled power efficiency, security and reliability”.
“Size, weight and power are extremely important considerations in designing a thermal imaging system,” said Federic Aubrun, CCO of IR imaging company, Xenics.
“Microchip SmartFusion and PolarFire FPGAs provide the best balance between small form factor, power efficiency and processing resources within an extremely low power budget in our current and next-generation products,” he said.
Michael Yampolsky, founder and CEO of Kaya Instruments, said the company uses PolarFire FPGAs because of the small footprint and energy efficiency. “They enable our cameras to fit into tight spaces while getting high quality, low noise, excellent dynamic range and large feature set utilising the latest CMOS sensor technology,” he said. He added that using the PolarFire FPGAs allows the company to bring its latest vision technology [industrial grade imaging equipment, including small form factor cameras and frame grabbers] to market quickly.
Unlike alternatives that offer baseline support for overly broad application categories, PolarFire FPGA intelligent edge solution stacks are tailored to specific technologies and vertical market requirements and include detailed intellectual property (IP), reference designs, development kits with sample designs, application notes and demo guides.
The PolarFire FPGA and SoC intelligent edge solutions are available for smart embedded vision (H.264 compression, HDMI, serial digital interface and CoaXpress).
For industrial edge, there are motor control and OPC/UA versions and for edge communications there are stacks for software defined radios, USXGMII, a small form factor pluggable (SFP+) optical module and 5G ORAN.
