Flex Logix makes eFPGA available for SiFive design environment
- Autor:Ella Cai
- Lassen Sie auf:2017-11-02
SiFive is teaming up with Flex Logix to make EFLX eFPGA available for the SiFive Freedom Platform as part of the DesignShare program.
The availability of Flex Logix IP through DesignShare eases time to market and removes traditional barriers to entry that have blocked smaller companies from developing custom silicon.
“The addition of Flex Logix’s best-in-class embedded FPGA platform to the DesignShare ecosystem provides engineers with a new and better way to bring SoCs to market,” says Naveed Sherwani, CEO of SiFive, “the adoption of the RISC-V architecture continues to experience significant growth, and the addition of embedded FPGA technologies through DesignShare will make it easier and more flexible for designers to employ RISC-V in their future designs across a wide range of implementations, from embedded devices to the data center.”
The Freedom Platform gives any company, inventor or maker the ability to harness the power of custom silicon and incorporate world-class IP into their products.
Unlike the traditional ASIC model, which greatly restricts the number of viable designs by requiring a significant upfront investment for IP and development, the SiFive Freedom Platform and its DesignShare partners reduce and defer this investment by providing low- or no-cost IP during the prototyping phase.
By reducing the investment cost and streamlining the IP acquisition process, the DesignShare program aims to significantly increase the number of new silicon designs starts.
SiFive will collaborate with Flex Logix to make its EFLX embedded FPGA available for the SiFive Freedom Platform of SoCs at 28nm and 180 nm, with several embedded FPGA array size options available for each node.
The EFLX embedded FPGA also will be integrated into a future tape-out of the SiFive U500 base platform for customer evaluation using SiFive evaluation boards and software. Flex Logix embedded FPGA for the SiFive Freedom Platform can directly connect up to 64 GPIO while acting as a reconfigurable accelerator for specific tasks, increasing battery life, improving programmable serial I/O functions and offloading low-level, repetitive processing from the CPU.
“There is a critical need in the chip industry to provide a faster, cheaper way for innovative companies to rapidly prototype new, advanced chip architectures,” says Geoff Tate, CEO of Flex Logix, “through DesignShare, SiFive and Flex Logix can give customers a highly programmable, flexible chip design for both microcontroller SoCs and multicore process SoCs. The RISC-V architecture provides excellent performance, and – when combined with embedded FPGA functionality, can provide higher performance in a reconfigurable way.”
The availability of Flex Logix IP through DesignShare eases time to market and removes traditional barriers to entry that have blocked smaller companies from developing custom silicon.
“The addition of Flex Logix’s best-in-class embedded FPGA platform to the DesignShare ecosystem provides engineers with a new and better way to bring SoCs to market,” says Naveed Sherwani, CEO of SiFive, “the adoption of the RISC-V architecture continues to experience significant growth, and the addition of embedded FPGA technologies through DesignShare will make it easier and more flexible for designers to employ RISC-V in their future designs across a wide range of implementations, from embedded devices to the data center.”
The Freedom Platform gives any company, inventor or maker the ability to harness the power of custom silicon and incorporate world-class IP into their products.
Unlike the traditional ASIC model, which greatly restricts the number of viable designs by requiring a significant upfront investment for IP and development, the SiFive Freedom Platform and its DesignShare partners reduce and defer this investment by providing low- or no-cost IP during the prototyping phase.
By reducing the investment cost and streamlining the IP acquisition process, the DesignShare program aims to significantly increase the number of new silicon designs starts.
SiFive will collaborate with Flex Logix to make its EFLX embedded FPGA available for the SiFive Freedom Platform of SoCs at 28nm and 180 nm, with several embedded FPGA array size options available for each node.
The EFLX embedded FPGA also will be integrated into a future tape-out of the SiFive U500 base platform for customer evaluation using SiFive evaluation boards and software. Flex Logix embedded FPGA for the SiFive Freedom Platform can directly connect up to 64 GPIO while acting as a reconfigurable accelerator for specific tasks, increasing battery life, improving programmable serial I/O functions and offloading low-level, repetitive processing from the CPU.
“There is a critical need in the chip industry to provide a faster, cheaper way for innovative companies to rapidly prototype new, advanced chip architectures,” says Geoff Tate, CEO of Flex Logix, “through DesignShare, SiFive and Flex Logix can give customers a highly programmable, flexible chip design for both microcontroller SoCs and multicore process SoCs. The RISC-V architecture provides excellent performance, and – when combined with embedded FPGA functionality, can provide higher performance in a reconfigurable way.”
