Actel puts Cortex-M1 in Igloo
Portable devices are set to become a lucrative market for fpga vendors, according to Martin Mason, senior director of silicon product marketing for Actel, which anticipates demand trebling in the next couple of years to exceed $500million. It believes fpgas will benefit from a migration away from low power asics.
Planning to increase its market share in this sector, the company has optimised ARM’s Cortex-M1 processor core for use in the Igloo fpga range and is offering the core free of charge. “The design cycle time needs to be shorter,” Mason claimed, “and there is pressure to use devices which get products to market more quickly.”
Initially, Actel is launching the M1AGL600, with 600k system gates and 108kbit of sram. The Cortex-M1 in this part uses less than a third of the available logic. Additional devices will follow, including one part with 258k gates and another with ‘more than a million’ gates, said Mason.