Renesas Electronics Corp. has created a new family of field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) that will officially launch the company into the market.
Called the ForgeFPGA family, the FPGAs will be low-cost, low-power devices that will serve markets where small amounts of programmable logic can be quickly designed into applications.
The development of the ForgeFPGA family comes after Renesas completed its acquisition of Dialog Semiconductor, which took place in August, and comes from the same development team that developed the GreenPAK programmable mixed-signal devices.
The markets these FPGAs will serve will offer cost savings versus other alternatives and open up areas that previously could not use FPGAs due to cost constraints such as consumer electronics and internet of things (IoT) applications.
The features of the ForgeFPGA family include:
- Low power — as low as 20 microamps standby
- Low price — about $0.50 in volume
- Free, downloadable software with no license fees
- Ability in high volumes
The FPGAs will serve applications that require less than 5,000 gates of logic with initial device sizes of 1K and 2K look up tables (LUTs). Two development modes are available to designers: a microcell mode used to schematic capture-based development flow; and HDL mode that provides a Verilog environment for FPGA veterans.
