FPGA platform simplifies integration into new or existing edge designs

Lattice Semiconductor Corporation announced the first FPGA developed on its new Lattice Nexus FPGA platform, CrossLink-NX. This new FPGA provides the low power, small form factor, reliability, and performance that developers need to create innovative embedded vision and AI solutions for communications, compute, industrial, automotive, and consumer systems.

FPGAs are a compelling hardware platform for embedded vision and AI applications, as they perform functions in parallel. This parallel architecture significantly accelerates certain processing workloads, including data inferencing.

The CrossLink-NX family was designed using the new Lattice Nexus platform, which combines a 28 nm FD-SOI manufacturing process with a new, Lattice-designed, FPGA fabric architecture optimized for low power operation in a small form factor.

Key features of the CrossLink-NX include:

• Low power – built on the Lattice Nexus FPGA platform, CrossLink-NX provides up to a 75 percent reduction in power consumption compared to competing FPGAs of a similar class.
• High reliability – CrossLink-NX has a Soft Error Rate (SER) up to 100 times lower than similar FPGAs in its class, making it a compelling solution for mission critical applications that must operate safely and reliably. The initial CrossLink-NX device is designed to support ruggedized environments found in outdoor, industrial, and automotive applications.
• Performance – CrossLink-NX delivers enhanced performance enabled by three key elements:
  • Fast I/O support – CrossLink-NX FPGAs are well-suited for embedded vision applications thanks to support for multiple fast I/Os, including MIPI, PCIe and DDR3 memory.
  • Instant on performance – to better support applications where a long system boot time is unacceptable, such as industrial motor control, CrossLink-NX enables ultra-fast I/O configuration in 3 ms and total device configuration in less than 15 ms.
  • High memory to logic ratio – to efficiently power AI inferencing in Edge devices, CrossLink-NX features 170 bits of memory for every logic cell, the highest memory to logic ratio in its class, providing 2x the performance compared to prior generations.
• Small form factor – to support customer system miniaturization, the first CrossLink-NX device is available in a 6 x 6 mm form factor which is up to ten times smaller than similar competing FPGAs in its class.
• Software tools and IP – in addition to its new Lattice Radiant 2.0 design software, Lattice offers a robust library of popular IP cores including interfaces like MIPI D-PHY, PCIe, SGMII and OpenLDI, and demos for common embedded vision applications such as 4:1 image sensor aggregation.

Originally scheduled for availability in 2020, Lattice is releasing CrossLink-NX ahead of schedule and is already sampling devices with select customers. For more information, please visit www.latticesemi.com/CrossLink-NX.