New FPGA products: FPGA system-on-chip with RISC-V hard core is coming

Not long ago, Microchip issued a press release introducing its new medium-bandwidth field programmable gate array (FPGA) and FPGA system-on-chip (SoC) devices. According to its press release, the new FPGA and SoC products cut static power consumption by half. Compared with similar devices, they have the smallest heat-generating area, but there is no loss of performance and computing power. The new products are low-density PolarFire FPGA (MPF050T) and PolarFire SoC (MPFS025T).
 

Figure: PolarFire series FPGA specific parameters (Source: Microchip official website)
Specific parameters
Let's take a look at the specific parameters of these two new FPGA products. Microchip's official website has the specific parameters of these two new products, such as a 2MB L2 cache, support for low-power DDR4 (LPDDR4) memory, SerDes that supports up to 12.5Gbps, and support for PCIe interfaces, and so on.

In addition, the new PolarFire series FPGA has a more efficient DSP module; it is mainly used for 4K/2K image processing and supports MIPI's CSI-2 protocol; supports image sensor interfaces, such as SLVS-EC; static power consumption has been greatly improved The official claims that the power consumption is only one-tenth that of competitors, and SerDes power consumption has also been greatly improved; it has a relatively small package size and a complete RISC-V ecosystem.

Among them, PolarFire FPGA SoC also has a hardened application-level RISC-V architecture processor and a processor subsystem that supports five-core Linux, bringing an innovative royalty-free, mid-range embedded computing platform to the market.

Figure: Functional block diagram of PolarFire FPGA SoC (Source: Microchip's data sheet)

The implementation of the RISC-V CPU microarchitecture is a simple five-stage single-shot sequential pipeline, which is not affected by the exploitation of Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities that exist in commonly used disordered machines. All five CPU cores are consistent with the memory subsystem and support a multi-functional combination of deterministic real-time systems and Linux in a single multi-core CPU cluster.
Microchip's FPGA product line and features
In fact, Microchip's FPGA product line is mainly derived from Microsemi, which was acquired in 2018. Microsemi's products include high-performance radiation tolerant analog mixed-signal integrated circuits, FPGAs, SoCs and ASICs, power management products, timing/synchronization devices that set global time standards and precise time solutions, voice processing devices, radio frequency solutions, discrete components, Enterprise storage and communication solutions, security technology and scalable tamper-proof products, Ethernet solutions, power-over-Ethernet ICs and intermediate jumper solutions, and other custom design capabilities and services. Among them, FPGA is its most important product line.

Nowadays, Microchip's FPGA product line mainly has three, namely ultra-low-density FPGA, low-power medium-density FPGA, and high-density FPGA.

Figure: Overview of Microchip's current product line (Source: Microchip)

It is reported that Microchip's FPGA products have four main features. One is low power consumption. According to the official introduction, it is about 50% lower than the competition; the other is the proven security, because its products have many built-in security and encryption engines. ; The third is the FPGA configuration of SEU immunity. SEU refers to Single-Event Upsets (SEU). Specifically, components are affected by radiation and cause the potential state to jump, "0" becomes "1" ", or "1" becomes "0", but it generally does not cause physical damage to the device; the fourth is instantaneous and non-volatile, it can work immediately after power-on, no configuration process is required.
Application scenario
Generally speaking, high-speed signal processing is required, such as radar signals, image signal acquisition, and communication signals. Real-time requirements are relatively high. When parallel and pipeline processing are required, FPGAs are required to implement. Because Microchip has lower power consumption, it can be used in low-power intelligent embedded vision applications and heat-constrained automotive, industrial automation, communications, defense and Internet of Things systems.
About supply
According to reports, developers can use Microchip's Libero software tool for new product development, which already supports the latest PolarFire FPGA and FPGA SoC products, but the batch shipment of new FPGA products will wait until the first quarter of 2022.