FPGA family has lots to like — Lattice Semiconductor

FPGA family has lots to like — Lattice Semiconductor

There is a lot to like about the new Lattice ECP3 FPGA family. For one thing, they have up to 16 3.2-Gbit/s SERDES with 10-GbE XAUI jitter compliance. That’s twice as many channels as others in the midrange class and they take only 90 to 110 mW/channel. The SERDES support PCI Express, Gbit Ethernet, and Serial Rapid I/O. The devices also have 800-MHz DDR3 memory interfaces, and 400-MHz cascadable DSP slices. Logic density varies from 17K to 149K LUTs, and the largest device can have up to 586 user I/Os.

Power is absolutely critical in many current FPGA applications and the fully active power for the 149K-LUT device is about a watt and a half, said to be 30% lower than competing devices. Standby (leakage) power is a bit higher than that of some competitors, but as much as 50% lower than previous versions. And, the largest version (with 149K LUTs) has been sampling since September and is in production now. Prices for the ECP3-150 in the 672 fpBGA package start at $75 in production qty.

Lattice Semiconductor , Hillsboro , OR
Brian Kiernan 503-268-8739

http://www.latticesemi.com