LATTICE SEMICONDUCTOR CORPORATION - All
- Programmable Logic (FPGA, CPLD…)
It's a big day here at Lattice as we've just launched the new CertusPro™-NX family of general purpose FPGAs, the latest family to be developed on our Lattice Nexus™ development platform.
In case you're unfamiliar with the Nexus platform, it marked the most significant update to low power FPGA technology in nearly a decade. We announced Nexus, and the first product family developed on the platform (the Lattice CrossLink™-NX FPGAs for embedded vision applications) in late 2019. In Q2 2020, we launched the Lattice Certus™-NX family and reset industry expectations around power and performance characteristics for general purpose FPGAs. In Q4 2020, we introduced the Lattice Mach™-NX family to provide state-of-the-art cyber-resilient system control. Now, with the launching of the CertusPro-NX family, we are taking low-power, high-performance, general purpose FPGAs to the next level.
We're expanding our leadership with the Nexus platform.
The Nexus platform combines our long standing low power FPGA expertise with 28 nm FD-SOI semiconductor manufacturing technology. The Nexus platform's use of silicon on insulator (the SOI in FD-SOI) technology makes Nexus FPGAs highly resistant to radiation interference, thereby providing a 100x lower soft error rate (SER) in comparison to similar devices implemented using bulk CMOS process technologies.
The Nexus platform also provides developers with tremendous flexibility when it comes to power consumption. By varying the biasing of the substrate, they can decide whether they wish to run for the device in high performance (HP) or low power (LP) modes.
But power consumption isn't the only feature that benefits from the Nexus platform. Nexus devices like the CertusPro-NX routinely outperform similar competing devices in other areas as well, including data processing performance, system bandwidth, memory density, and support for small form factors.
The CertusPro-NX FPGA architecture is optimized for high-performance computing to support applications like data inferencing in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) applications. The programmable fabric is augmented with ultra-efficient DSP blocks and both small and large internal memory blocks for low-latency data processing. Furthermore, CertusPro-NX devices are the only general purpose FPGAs that offer LPDDR4 external memory support; a popular memory technology used by developers across many application spaces. As a result, these devices offer up to 65 percent more memory and 2X the performance while consuming half the power of competitive offerings.
A closer look at the CertusPro-NX.
CertusPro-NX FPGAs also support up to eight programmable SERDES lanes capable of speeds up to 10.3 Gbps to deliver the highest system bandwidth in their class (up to 2X the bandwidth of similar competing FPGAs). This enables fast performance for popular communication and display interfaces like 10 Gigabit Ethernet, PCI Express, SLVS-EC, CoaXPress, and DisplayPort.
With regard to enabling small form factor systems, the largest capacity CertusPro-NX device with 100k logic cells (LCs) has a package that is 81 mm2. The closest competitor is an Intel Cyclone V GT at 121 mm2, (1.5X larger than CertusPro-NX) although this only has 77k Logic Elements (Intel's equivalent to the LC). In the case of a Xilinx Artix-7 with 100k logic cells, the size difference is even larger; at 529 mm2 the Xilinx part is 6.5X the size of the CertusPro-NX. Small component sizes are critical to applications with tight space restrictions like industrial cameras or the SFP modules used in communication systems.
A major requirement for safety-critical and mission-critical systems is reliability. In addition to supporting junction temperatures from -40°C to +125°C, innovations in the Lattice Nexus platform make CertusPro-NX devices up to 100 times more resistant to the soft errors experienced by all electronic devices due to background radiation. This means CertusPro-NX FPGAs can bring high levels of reliability at commercially reasonable cost to next-generation communications, embedded, industrial, and automotive applications that help keep systems online and end users safe.
We're also excited to announce a new version of our easy-to-use Lattice Radiant® design software is now available. In addition to supporting CertusPro-NX FPGAs, Radiant 3.0 offers improved signal traceability throughout the design flow to make it easier for developers to trace a signal between the HDL source to the RTL view, and to the technology view and back again. The new version lets users choose between using the Lattice Synthesis Engine (LSE) or the Synplify Pro® synthesis engine to enable greater design flexibility. In Radiant 3.0, timing analysis has been separated from other operations so it can run independently. This dramatically speeds the iterative design process by letting designers explore different 'what-if' scenarios in their designs without having to re-run mapping and place-and-route.
The bottom line is that CertusPro-NX general purpose FPGAs are best-in-class in terms of power, Edge AI processing, memory, bandwidth, capacity, and reliability, and they help customers innovate in a wide range of applications: data co-processing in intelligent systems, sophisticated control for 5G communications infrastructure, and sensor interface bridging in ADAS systems. The possible use cases for CertusPro-NX are only limited by developers' imaginations, and we can't wait to see how our customers leverage the performance capabilities of the newest Nexus FPGA family in their future application designs.
For a closer look at the performance characteristics of Lattice CertusPro-NX FPGAs, please take a look at this whitepaper.
- Nexus
- CertusPro-NX
- AI
- ML
- automotive
- industrial
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Lattice Semiconductor Corporation published this content on 23 June 2021 and is solely responsible for the information contained therein. Distributed by Public, unedited and unaltered, on 23 June 2021 16:06:08 UTC.
