Actel readies modified PCI FPGA family

Electronic News, April 15, 1996 by Andrew MacLellan

Sunnyvale, Calif.--Claiming to have streamlined the time-to-market of PCI-compliant custom system design, Actel this week will roll out a modified family of PCI field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and a high-performance VHDL and Verilog FPGA design kit for telecommunications, graphics, signal processing and computing applications.

The company's ACT 3 PCI Design Kit includes a VHDL or Verilog test bench, a full suite of high-level design tools, including Actel's Designer Series 3.0 toolset, as well as CorePCI VHDL and Verilog-HDL models.

To ensure compatibility with the design kit, Actel recently modified the I/Os of three of its existing ACT 3 family of chips which are included in the FPGA kit. The first two ICs, the A14100BP and the A1460BP, are shipping now, featuring 10,000 usable gates with 228 user I/Os and 6,000 usable gates with 168 user I/Os, respectively. Both ICs operate at 150MHz. The 4,000-gate A1440BP is not yet available. Based on Actel's antifuse FPGA architecture, the ACT 3 PCI chips offer access rates as low as 8.5 nanoseconds and input setup of 1.5ns, with chip-to-chip throughputs up to 100MHz.

"This is the first FPGA package to maximize PCI performance with VHDL or Verilog-HDL, giving designers flexibility and quick time-to-market," said Robert Nalesnik, Actel's director of product marketing. "With zero wait-state operation at 33MHz, ACT 3 PCI offers a high-performance solution with the flexibility normally associated with high-level design."

Packaged in a 208-pin plastic quad flat pack (PQFP), the A1460BP will sell for $79 in 5,000-unit volumes, with a target price of $40. The A14100BP is packaged in a 208-pin PQFP and is priced at $149 in 5,000-unit volumes. Target price for the chip is below $90. The A1440BP, packaged in 160-pin PQFP, is priced at $49, with volume pricing expected at $25.

The design kit's VHDL and Verilog CorePCI models can be dropped into any Actel design, saving development time and increasing reliability, according to the company. Of the three HDL models to be released, the first is the CorePCI-Slave, which is priced at $3,995 for a site license and is available now. The others, the Core PCI-Master and CorePCI-Bridge for VHDL and Verilog-HDL, will be available in June for $4,995 each.

"Current FPGAs have the potential to aid in the development of high-performance PCI designs," said Duane Koruda, an ASIC research analyst for Dataquest. "With the introduction of Actel's PCI Design Kit--with truly synthesizable macros, design tools and silicon--the design of PCI applications using FPGAs is more feasible."