Microcsemi unveil low-cost IGLOO2 FPGA evaluation kit

The IGLOO2 FPGA Evaluation Kit includes a PCIe control plane demonstration design that streamlines and accelerates the development of transceiver I/O-based FPGA designs to build PCIe and Gigabit Ethernet based systems. As the kit is PCI Express form factor compliant, it allows for design, evaluation and development using a standard laptop with an ExpressCard slot or a desktop with a PCIe slot. Designers can also explore the high performance memory system capabilities of IGLOO2 FPGAs.

Paul Ekas, vice president of Marketing for SoC products at Microsemi, comments: “This low-cost platform enables evaluation and prototyping of our newest FPGA family and offers full access to common electrical interfaces including PCIe, which are requirements for many mainstream applications. The kit also includes methods to perform power measurements on our industry-leading low power IGLOO2 FPGA. This is an important feature when designing products where low power is a critical factor.”

The IGLOO2 FPGA Evaluation Kit features the 12K logic element M2GL010T-1FGG484 device and includes an RJ45 interface to 10/100/1000 Ethernet, Full-Duplex SERDES SMAs, 512MB of LPDDR, 64MB SPI Flash, USB-UART connections as well as I2C, SPI and GPIO headers. The kit includes a 12 volt power supply but can also be powered via the PCIe edge connector and a FlashPro4 JTAG programmer for programming and debugging. The kit allows for development and testing of PCIe Gen2 x1 lane designs, as well as testing of the FPGA transceiver’s signal quality using full-duplex SERDES SMA pairs. Test points are conveniently pulled out to allow easy power measurements using a standard digital multi-meter.

Worldwide IGLOO2 Seminar Series

Microsemi, in conjunction with its worldwide distribution partners, will be hosting a series of seminars globally. These seminars will include hands-on training with the IGLOO2 FPGA Evaluation Kit and Libero System-on-Chip software.

IGLOO2 FPGAs

Microsemi’s IGLOO2 FPGAs continue the company’s focus on addressing the needs of today’s cost-optimized FPGA market by providing a LUT-based fabric, 5G transceiver, high speed GPIO, block RAM, high-performance memory subsystem, and DSP blocks in a differentiated, cost and power optimized architecture. This next generation IGLOO2 architecture offers up to five times more logic density and three times more fabric performance than its predecessors and combines a non-volatile Flash-based fabric with the highest number of general purpose I/O, 5G SERDES interfaces and PCIe end points when compared to other products in its class. IGLOO2 FPGAs offer best-in-class feature integration coupled with the lowest power, highest reliability and most advanced security in the industry.

Pricing and availability

The IGLOO2 FPGA Evaluation Kit, M2GL-EVAL-KIT, is available for ordering now at an introductory price of $99 for the first 1,000 orders. The kit includes Microsemi’s Libero SoC Gold Software License. The toolset is a comprehensive software toolset for designing with Microsemi FPGAs and SoC FPGAs. Libero SoC supports the IGLOO2 FPGA family by managing the entire design flow from design entry, synthesis and simulation, through place-and-route, timing and power analysis. It also enables FPGA development and utilization of the reference designs made available with the kit.