Mid-range FPGAs cut static power consumption in half

Microchip Technology Inc. has cut the static power consumption in half for its mid-bandwidth PolarFire FPGAs and FPGA system-on-chip (SoC) devices, compared to all alternative devices in their class, according to the company. These devices are designed to reduce the thermal footprint, eliminating fans and other heat mitigation solutions, in edge compute systems without compromising the compute horsepower.

Microchip claims its latest low-density PolarFire FPGAs (MPF050T) and PolarFire SoC (MPFS025T) additions, with ultra-low power consumption, exceed the performance/power metrics of any low-density FPGA or SoC FPGA alternatives in the market. These devices feature fast FPGA fabric and signal processing capabilities and the industry’s only hardened application class RISC-V architecture-based processor with 2 megabytes (MB) of L2 cache and low-power DDR4 (LPDDR4) memory support.

The extended portfolio with a 25K logic elements multi-core RISC-V SoC and a 50K logic elements FPGA opens new application possibilities, said Microchip. These include low-power smart embedded vision applications and thermally-constrained automotive, industrial automation, communications, defense, and IoT systems where power and performance cannot be compromised.

Developers can begin designing with Microchip’s PolarFire FPGAs and FPGA SoCs using the company’s recently released Libero 2021.2 software tools. Volume shipment of production silicon is scheduled for the first quarter of 2022. The new PolarFire devices also are complemented by a suite of Microchip devices for complete systems solutions, along with plug-and-play solutions for power and timing.

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