Microsemi announces the industry's lowest power consumption, cost-optimized FPGA product line

     Microsemi Corporation announced the new cost-optimized PolarFire Field Programmable Logic Device (FPGA) product family, offering the industry's lowest power 12.7 Gbps serialization/de-serialization (SerDes) transceiver in the medium density range of FPGA devices. As well as leading safety and reliability. The FPGA product family is suitable for a wide range of applications, including wired access networks and cellular infrastructure, defense and commercial aviation markets, as well as Industry 4.0 applications including industrial automation and Internet of Things (IoT) markets.

     "Our new FPGA product family changes the market's perception of traditional mid-scale FPGA devices." Bruce Weyer, vice president and Business Unit manager at Microsemi, said: "For the first time, a non-volatile FPGA device has all known benefits, with clear power and cost advantages over SRAM FPgas with 10 Gpbs transceivers, providing the necessary differentiation to fill a gap in the market while meeting the changing needs of our customers."

     With the PolarFire FPGA device, Microsemi's potential market for FPGA devices has expanded to more than $2.5 billion, covering both low - and mid-range FPGA segments, and the innovative nature of the new product family supports the company's continued growth in the communications infrastructure market.

     Today's cellular infrastructure and wired access networks are undergoing a rapid transformation to deliver terabytes of high-value content to customers while reducing operating and asset expenses, as well as their heat consumption and carbon emissions. Microsemi's PolarFire FPGA devices provide the lowest power consumption at 10Gbps ports, providing cost-effective bandwidth processing power for increasing aggregation services. The new FPGA family can also address the growing number of real-world network security threats in the market, as well as the reliability issues associated with single event flip (SEU) for the configured memory of FPGA devices based on deep submeter SRAM.

     The new devices are suitable for multiple communication market applications, including wired access, network edge, and metro areas (1 to 40G). Wireless heterogeneous networking, wireless backhaul, intelligent optical modules and video broadcasting. These devices are also well suited for defense and aerospace market applications such as encryption and roots of trust, secure wireless communications, radar and electronic warfare (EW), aircraft networking, propulsion and control. Industrial market applications for PolarFire FPGA devices include process control and automation, machine vision processing and analysis, programmable logic controllers, industrial networking, and video and image processing.

     "PolarFire FPgas allow customers to achieve the 12.7G transceiver performance required for many medium-bandwidth applications without the need for a higher-power, higher-cost FPGA device, while extending the company's ultra-low power, high-reliability and high-security offerings." Shakeel Peera, Director of Marketing, SoC Products Division, Microsemi, said: "By combining cost-effective PolarFire FPGas with Megasome's broad portfolio of specialized standard products (ASSPs), end-to-end solutions for timing, voice processing, storage, Optical transport network (OTN) switching and transportation, as well as power management across multiple market segments, are possible."

     Microsemi works closely with select customers through the Early Access Program, and projects have already begun adopting the PolarFire product line. "In addition to developing advanced video compression, communications, test and measurement, networking and consumer products, A2e Technologies also provides related intellectual property (IP) and design services to the Megalomy customer base." Allen Vexler, Chief Technology Officer at A2e Technologies, said: "Microsemi offers FPGas with high signal processing performance, input/output (I/O) characteristics, and low power consumption, which is expected to change the way we develop streaming video products for surveillance, drones, and DVRS. It opens up a whole new set of possibilities."