With the release of 300,000 and 200,000 gate versions of the PolarPro
device, QuickLogic Europe announces it has broken new ground in FPGA power
consumption.
The QL1P300 and QL1P200, the large FPGAs with embedded SRAM are the third
and fourth members of the PolarPro family to reach full production status.
They complement existing versions with 100,000 and 75,000 gates. By
combining the flexibility and fast development times of FPGAs with ASIC-like
density and very low-power consumption, QL1P200 and QL1P300 create solutions
for consumer electronics products such as smartphones, personal media
players (PMPs) and portable navigation devices, as well as industrial
handheld products.
To address the critical issue of integrating more peripherals into handheld
products, such as hard disk drives, Wi-Fi chipsets and mobile TV chipsets,
while minimising energy consumption, PolarPro FPGAs provide engineers with
advanced energy-saving techniques. Both new devices have a 'clock gate'
feature allowing designers to directly disconnect the clock trees on the
fly, without having to worry about 'glitches' or 'runt clocks'. As a
result, engineers can implement efficient clock management schemes and lower
the dynamic power consumption significantly.
QL1P300 and QL1P200 also include a very low power (VLP) mode in which a
device draws less than 5 microamps of current in standby, a level never
before seen in FPGAs of this density. The VLP mode also retains the state of
the device, including I/Os, greatly simplifying system design. The PolarPro
family of devices includes a highly flexible embedded RAM block with
built-in FIFO controller logic, which enables fast guaranteed performance
and cost effective implementations, says the company.
"Our ultra low-power products extend battery life by as much as four times,
giving our customers a significant advantage over their competitors," said
Owen Bateman, QuickLogic Europe. "QuickLogic continues to supply the
industry with the leading FPGAs for consumer applications by combining the
critical features of low power, high performance and high density."
The QL1P200 and QL1P300 are supported by the QuickWorks 9.8.2 developer's
software package. The devices are packaged in 17mm x 17mm, 256-ball thin
fine-pitch ball grid arrays (TFBGA), says the company.
