a techfocus media publication :: December 13, 2005 :: volume I, no. 11
| a techfocus media publication :: December 13, 2005 :: volume I, no. 11 |
ANNOUNCEMENTS
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Finding Fusion In assembling a typical embedded system, we often find ourselves on our system-design podium, conducting a virtual symphony of suppliers – analog components companies for the wiggly parts of our system, MCU/CPU suppliers handing us processing capabilities, ASIC companies for high-performance custom hardware, and FPGA companies providing glue logic to help connect the incompatible parts we’re using from all the other suppliers. Any time we can increase our level of integration and reduce the number of suppliers and components, we save ourselves design time, BOM cost, power, and form-factor space. If we can integrate and add programmability, we also reduce our risk, further shorten our design cycles, and increase the life of our system in the field. Since we can distribute new software (or firmware) and hardware just by sending out a new bitstream for a programmable system-on-chip device, our customers can upgrade, add features, and get bug fixes after our systems have shipped. We can also develop a single physical hardware platform that can be reconfigured as many different product variants serving different points in the market by leveraging programmability. Actel announced this week that it has begun shipping its new Fusion programmable system-on-chip devices. The combination of features Fusion brings to the table sets a new standard for single-chip diversity for integration of embedded systems. Normally, we digitally-biased embedded systems designers consider only part of the picture in our quest for integration. We are all too happy to defer the analog part of our design to the tie-dye wearing types down the hall. They can have their own chips so none of that messy stuff spills over onto our silicon. Of course, we understand that our final product includes lots of things outside the boundaries of our “system-on-chip” efforts. Mechanical parts, power supplies, antennae, and other components congregate around our centerpiece device, brining data and signals in and out and connecting us to the physical world. It’s all too easy to let analog slide onto the other side of a dividing line in our system-level gerrymandering. Actel’s Fusion family is a programmable system device, probably closest to an FPGA with built-in analog. Fusion’s built-in analog allows us to integrate much more of our system into a soft-hardware reprogrammable device. We can have analog, ARM7 processors, memory, peripherals, interconnect busses, and custom hardware modules all contained in a single device that can be reprogrammed in the field. It challenges our usual definitions and requires us to re-think our regular design strategy, considering new possibilities. In order to ease that transition, Fusion also carries with it a well-conceived design environment and methodology that will simplify the task of assembling a single-chip, mixed-signal embedded system-on-chip with built-in volatile and non-volatile memory. |
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