Product category: Intellectual Property Cores
News Release from: Actel Europe | Subject: CorePCIF
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial Team on 6 June 2005
FPGA PCI core comes
with claims of versatility
CorePCIF is the newest member of Actel's popular PCI product family that also includes CorePCI and CorePCIX
Billed as the most versatile field-programmable gate array (FPGA) PCI core available, CorePCIF incorporates netlist and register transfer level (RTL) versions with 33 and 66MHz speeds, 32 and 64bit bus widths, as well as target, master and target-plus-master configurations all in one core. Additionally, Actel incorporated a host of new customer-requested features, including the addition of FIFOs at the application interface, CardBus and CompactPCI support, a simplified plug-and-play interface for PCI and an improved user test bench.
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 6 June 2005 at 8.00am (UK)
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Actel's PCI-SIG-compliant family is suitable for a variety of market segments, including military, aerospace, industrial, computer and storage.
'CorePCIF was designed to meet the requests of Actel's customers and provide unmatched flexibility and value', said Yankin Tanurhan, Director of IP and Applications at Actel.
'The rich feature set coupled with the inherent benefits offered by Actel's nonvolatile FPGAs, such as live at power-up capabilities and firm-error immunity, enable this new product to benefit the entire PCI user community'.
In addition to the feature set defined in the PCI 2.3 standard, the new core offers features requested by a number of Actel's 200-plus PCI customers.
Unique to Actel, the core is available in RTL, netlist and free evaluation versions, enabling designers to select the best format for their individual designs.
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By adding FIFO support, Actel enables an asynchronous backend and even higher throughput than possible with PCI devices or intellectual property (IP) that have a synchronous application interface.
Likewise, with support for the CardBus standard, a 32bit version of the PCMCIA PC card standard, the products of CorePCIF CardBus users can operate four to six times faster than 16bit PC cards.
The core also supports the Compact PCI standard, which is popular in a variety of markets including military and industrial.
The core has a simplified plug-and-play interface for PCI due to its six base address registers (BARs), an improvement over CorePCI's two BARs.
The core offers a fully updated user-configurable test bench, allowing users to build a system test bench to their specifications.
Additionally, the reconfigured hot-swap capability enables simple hot swap per the Compact PCI standard, while Actel's inherently live at power-up, nonvolatile devices uniquely ensure hot swap with no delay.
Actel is the only company to offer industrial temperature grade 66MHz PCI capability on a value-based FPGA, the ProASIC3 device.
The core is capable of 66MHz/64bit, 33/32, 66/32 and 33/64 operation.
A number of configurations are also available in both CorePCI and CorePCIF, including target, master and target-plus-master.
Competing IP cores require users to buy two or more IP cores for all of these configurations.
Additionally, Actel's CorePCIF does not require fixed placement and is smaller and less expensive.
For example, users can obtain a 33/32 or 66/64 PCI target on an Actel ProASIC3 device for less than $5 in volume quantities.
Actel's CorePCIF is available now to work with all recent Actel antifuse and Flash product families, including Actel's third-generation ProASIC3 Flash-based FPGAs.
Pricing starts at $5000 for a single-use netlist.
Existing CorePCI family customers can take advantage of a special introductory price of $1000 for a single-use netlist.
A free evaluation version of CorePCIF is available for download via Actel's website. Request a free brochure from Actel Europe....
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