Lattice Semiconductor expanded its growing portfolio of automotive products with the announcement of versions of the Lattice Certus-NX FPGA family optimized for infotainment, advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), and safety-focused applications. Built on the Lattice Nexus platform, these new Certus-NX devices combine automotive-grade features with best-in-class I/O density, power efficiency, small size, reliability, instant-on performance, and support for fast PCI Express (PCIe) and Gigabit Ethernet interfaces.

The latest Certus-NX FPGAs are ideal for automotive applications like motor control, LED control in in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) systems, in-vehicle networking (IVN), and sensor data co-processing in ADAS applications. Key features of Certus-NX FPGAs include:

Low power consumption – Up to 4X lower power use than similar FPGAs, with a programmable back-bias that enables user-selectable high performance or low power operating modes, depending on the needs of the application.

Small form factor – Up to 3X smaller with up to 2X the I/O density per mm² in comparison to similar competing FPGAs.

Instant-on performance – Ultra-fast device configuration from SPI memory up to 12X faster than similar competing FPGAs, with individual I/Os able to configure in just 3 ms, and full-device startup in only 8-14 ms, depending on device capacity.

Robust I/O interfacing capability – Lattice’s extensive Certus-NX I/O IP library includes 1.5 Gbps differential I/O with performance up to 70 percent higher than competing FPGAs, 5 Gbps PCIe, 1.5 Gbps SGMII, and 1066 Mbps DDR3.

Automotive certification and high reliability – Certus-NX FPGAs are AEC-Q100 qualified and provide up to 100X better soft-error rate (SER) performance than similar FPGAs.

Authentication and encryption – To protect bitstreams against unauthorized access, Certus-NX FPGAs support AES-256 encryption with ECDSA; they are currently the smallest FPGAs on the market to support ECDSA.

Ease of use/design – Lattice Radiant and Lattice Propel software tools help simplify and accelerate automotive system design. Certus-NX FPGAs are also supported by the Lattice mVision and Lattice sensAI solution stacks so designers can leverage the stacks’ modular hardware platforms, reference designs, neural network IP cores, and custom design services to accelerate automotive vision system design.

Automotive-grade versions of Certus-NX FPGAs are now sampling with select customers.