Software has designs on high-performance FPGAs

The LatticeSC/M families are the latest FPGAs in the growing list of devices that can be programmed using Altium Designer.

Altium Designer now includes support for the LatticeSC and LatticeSCM (collectively, the LatticeSC/M) families of high-performance FPGA devices.

The LatticeSC/M families are the latest FPGAs in the growing list of devices, from all major vendors, that can be programmed using Altium Designer.

Developers using the Altium Designer environment can now target designs for LatticeSC/M devices with full synthesis support.

The extensive range of presynthesised ready-to-use FPGA-based components that come standard with Altium Designer, including high-level processor and peripheral cores, can be used to develop complete systems on the high-performance LatticeSC/M FPGAs.

The unified Altium Designer system also supports the development of systems right through to board design and production within the same environment.

Electronics designers can easily target any supported device during development, eliminating the need to change development platforms or purchase additional software and specific device support modules.

Altium Designer's unified design environment also allows designers to retarget the programmable elements of a design to a range of different processor platforms, both FPGA-hosted and discrete, during development without significant software or hardware rework.

This means that crucial application architecture decisions can remain open until much later in the development cycle than is currently possible.

LatticeSC/SCM-based daughter boards for Altium's Desktop NanoBoard reconfigurable hardware platform are currently in development.

The Desktop NanoBoard provides a vendor-neutral development platform that features plug-in FPGA daughter boards to house the target devices, as well as interchangeable peripheral boards.

According to Nick Martin, CEO of Altium: "By unlocking the potential of FPGAs with our Altium Designer software, we are challenging electronics designers to consider new ways to design electronic products, and to extend their existing skills into new areas".

"We see this unified approach to electronics design - embracing hardware, software and programmable hardware - as the future of electronics product design".

"The addition of support for these Lattice devices keeps our customers up-to-date with the latest device technology".

"Designers using the LatticeSC/M FPGAs will be able to exploit the advantages of unified design and easily make use of the devices to accelerate their application development within Altium Designer".

According to Tim Schnettler, Lattice's Director of Design Tools Marketing: "The LatticeSC/M FPGA families offer a powerful combination of a high-performance FPGA fabric, 3.8Gbit/s serdes and dedicated logic blocks to efficiently implement communications standards".

"The unified Altium Designer environment makes this power accessible to all electronic product developers and allows designers to easily target designs to these advanced devices".

Support for the LatticeSC/M family will be available to all Altium Designer 6 licence holders in the next update.

Altium Designer 6 is available for immediate purchase through Altium's sales and support centres worldwide.

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