Rapidly prototype your smart connectivity designs

2nd September 2015

Nat Bowers

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Reducing development risk and accelerating time-to-market, the ECP5 Versa development kit has been introduced by Lattice Semiconductor. The kit accelerates the prototyping and testing of connectivity designs targeted for small cells, microserver, broadband access and industrial video applications worldwide.

Lattice optimised the ECP5 family’s architecture with the goal of delivering the best value below 100K LUTs, while adding key new features such as support for soft error correction and small form factor packages across all densities. Achieving 40% lower cost than competing solutions, optimisations include small LUT4 based logic slices with enhanced routing architecture, dual-channel SERDES to save silicon real estate and enhanced DSP blocks for up to four times resource improvements.

The family’s low power consumption, small form factor and low cost enable design engineers to rapidly add features and functions that complement those delivered by ASICs and ASSPs. The kit lets customers evaluate the connectivity performance of the ECP5 FPGA with a range of standards, including PCI Express, gigabit Ethernet, DDR3 and generic SERDES. Lattice also offers several proof-of-concept demos with the ECP5 Versa development kit that can help customers accelerate prototyping and testing of their designs.

Deepak Boppana, Director, Product Marketing, Lattice Semiconductor, commented: “When we developed the ECP5 family, we broke all the rules of conventional FPGA approaches in order to deliver the optimum connectivity solution tailored to meet the demands of compact, low power, high volume communications and industrial applications. ECP5 devices have proven to be an ideal companion chip for ASICs and ASSPs and we believe that the new ECP5 Versa development board will only help to further increase broad adoption across our served markets.”

The development kit also includes the Lattice Diamond Design Software that offers a complete suite of FPGA design tools with an easy-to-use interface, efficient design flow, superior design exploration and more. The Lattice Diamond software suite tailored specifically for the ECP5 Versa kit will be available free of charge to all users purchasing the board.

The ECP5 Versa development kit is available direct from Lattice at a limited promotional price of $99.