Lattice Announces First Low Cost FPGA with Serial RapidIO 2.1 Support

RapidIO has won broad acceptance in wireless infrastructure applications, where it is used as a primary interconnect for DSP clusters in baseband processing. In the past, vendors had to rely on expensive, premium FPGAs for these applications. However, the combination of the Serial RapidIO 2.1 core and the LatticeECP3 FPGA will now allow customers to develop low-power infrastructure solutions for 3G, LTE and WiMAX without sacrificing performance or cost. The Serial RapidIO 2.1 core and other Lattice IP cores such as low latency CPRI and GbE/SGMII comprise a comprehensive IP suite in support of wireless infrastructure applications.

We are pleased to have been selected to provide RapidIO 2.1 endpoint IP for the Lattice low cost ECP3 FPGA. As the only supplier of fully compliant RapidIO 2.1 IP, Praesum's partnership with Lattice will help to accelerate deployment of this next generation technology in high performance signal processing applications. When combined with our RapidIO 2.1 switching IP, the endpoint IP for the LatticeECP3 FPGA represents a complete solution for wireless infrastructure equipment vendors, said Kent Dahlgren, Praesum's CEO.

Our partnership with Praesum has yielded the first programmable Serial RapidIO 2.1 endpoint solution, and an interoperability ecosystem that will dramatically reduce cost and power for wireless infrastructure manufacturers, said Shakeel Peera, Lattice's Director of Marketing for SRAM FPGAs.
About the Serial RapidIO 2.1 IP core

Praesum is a leader in RapidIO switching, bridging, and endpoint IP. Its small footprint Serial RapidIO 2.1 IP core can be used for processor bridging, control plane interfaces and bridging to legacy interfaces. The core architecture for the Serial RapidIO 2.1 IP core includes the following features:

* Allows for 1x, 2x, 4x lane configurations
* Up to 3.125Gbps
* Implements physical layer, transport layer, maintenance transaction handling and error management extensions
* Provides infrastructure support for external logical layer functions, enabling maximum flexibility
* Provides a choice of logical layer functions that are important for the application
* Provides a choice of how logic layer functions interact with the rest of the system - SOC bus or streaming interfaces
* Supports software implementations of control plane oriented functions such as doorbells and messages
* Backward compatible with the v1.3 specification