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SoC from Microsemi - FPGA and ARM CM3

I know Xilinx and Altera have their SoC devices which are a bit high end with dual A9 type ARMs. I recently found out the Microsemi SoC which uses a CM3 can be bought for just $16 and a KickStart board is available for just $59. I like it.

The FPGA fabric is flash based rather than SRAM so you don't need to configure it each time it powers up. The CPU has up to 512 kB flash and

144 kB of SRAM. CAN, Ethernet and HS USB are included along with a number of simpler interfaces, DDR, SERDES and PCI3. Sounds like a pretty interesting device.

6k to 146k LUT4s, up to 240 math blocks and two sizes of block memory.

Anyone looking at using it? I'm thinking of getting the $59 board.

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Rick
Reply to
rickman
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I have looked at that part for some possible projects myself.

Reply to
Richard Damon

These are indeed very interesting parts, especially as they are flash based, which is attractive to safety related applications. We have three demo projects, some dating back to when they were Actel. Probably the newest demo we have is this one:

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Regards, Richard.

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Reply to
FreeRTOS info

Looks like the bigger ones are very expensive, which I guess is typical of big FPGA's.

Reply to
Paul Rubin

When they were early out I ignored them as the lowest priced one was $50. But at closer to $16 they seem to be much more practical. I think I am also ok with the 256 pin BGA. In the past when I looked at BGAs they all required fine pitch PCBs and very fine vias. Looks like this part will work ok with 5/5 mil PCB trace/space and 10 mil drills. I need to verify that, but if so, I no longer have much objection.

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Rick
Reply to
rickman

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