Introduction
In the short span of three decades, electronics have not only proliferated in our world, but have also gotten smaller and more portable. The march of Moore’s Law has brought portability to the consumer, industrial, military, medical and other markets.
As this demand within end markets has exploded, so too has the pressure for low power subsystems and ICs to power them. And, as the world is getting more excited about the increasing opportunity that electronics integration and mobility brings, so is the feverish demand for new products and new features to appear on store shelves “now.” This has radically altered electronics design choices and decisions upstream. Expensive ASICs or custom ICs simply do not work in markets where cost is a factor, but the ability to hit tight market windows and adapt to changing technology standards is paramount.
This paradigm shift puts the design imperative on Actel’s flash-based FPGAs, which offer both low power capability and system-design flexibility to meet time-to-market demands and changing user requirements and standards.
Actel FPGAs offer several benefits and solutions to enable next-generation handheld portable applications that include low power, small footprint packages, design security, live at power-up operation, integration and low cost.
Actel Technology Benefits: Enabling a New Era in Handheld Portable Applications
Low Power
Power is the system designer’s number 1 or number 2 concern as more devices go portable and live on batteries. The traditional solution was simple: select an ASIC that engineers could optimize for power and cost. But that is no longer an option in today’s world of thousands of modest-volume markets with ever-changing standards and market requirements.
There are four basic power components that need to be examined when evaluating the power consumption of different FPGA technologies:
1. Static power
2. Dynamic power
3. Power-up (or inrush power)
4. Configuration power
Total system power is a combination of all four of the power components over time.
The comparison charts in Figure 1 show the power-up power profiles (on the left) and the operation power profiles (on the right) of SRAM-based FPGAs and flash-based nonvolatile FPGAs.
Actel FPGAs’ true nonvolatile technology enables significant power reduction because they do not employ millions of power-hungry SRAM configuration bit cells and the size of the flash cell is significantly smaller than the SRAM cell. This results in significantly lower static power than SRAM-based solutions, making flash FPGAs ideal for power-sensitive handheld applications.
