DevKit reduces time-to-market through FMC expansion headers

2nd October 2014

Siobhan O'Gorman

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Designed for the communications, industrial, defence and aerospace markets, the SmartFusion2 150K LE SoC FPGA Advanced DevKit has been released by Microsemi. The kit features two FMC expansion headers which allow board-level designers and system architects to utilise off-the-shelf daughter cards to reduce time-to-market for a wide range of applications.

On a single chip, the kit integrates a flash-based FPGA fabric, a 166MHz Cortex-M3 processor, DSP blocks, SRAM, embedded NonVolatile Memory (eNVM) and communication interfaces. The FMC expansion headers allow the off-the-shelf daughter cards to be used for image and video processing, serial connectivity (SATA/SAS, SFP & SDI) and analogue (ADC & DAC) applications. This reduces cost whilst speeding up design development.

Alongside the FMC expansion headers, the DevKit is offered with a PCIe x4 edge connector, a USB port, Philips I2C, two gigabit Ethernet ports, an SPI and a UART. To measure core power consumption, the kit is provided with operational amplifier circuitry. The SmartFusion2 SoC FPGA memory management system is supported by 1GB of onboard DDR3 memory and a 2GB SPI flash which connects to the Microcontroller Subsystem (MSS) and the FPGA fabric. Users can access the serialiser and deserialiser (SERDES) blocks through the PCIe edge connector, the SMA connectors or the on-board FMC connector.

The SmartFusion2 150K LE SoC FPGA Advanced DevKit is offered with Microsemi’s Libero SoC design software, valued at $2,500. Through it's design wizards, editors and scripting engines, the software enables a faster time-to-market for SmartFusion2 and IGLOO2 FPGA-based designs.