Actel Corporation is the leading supplier of nonvolatile, low-power FPGAs, mixed-signal FPGAs, and programmable logic solutions. The company’s mission is to manage power consumption at both the chip and system levels, leveraging the industry’s ultra low-power FPGAs and unique mixed-signal FPGAs, to offer system designers a competitive edge.
Actel’s history of reliability, coupled with its unique flash-based technology, sets it apart from traditional FPGA manufacturers. Whether you’re designing applications for consumer and portable medical markets, tomorrow’s environmentally friendly data centers, industrial controls, or the automotive, space and military/aerospace markets, power matters.
Actel's IGLOO Icicle Kit based on the 5-µW IGLOO device, is a low-cost, portable, low-power demonstration platform powered by built-in rechargeable lithium-ion battery, USB cable, or external power. The Icicle evaluation board enables you to measure power consumption (dynamic, static, and Flash*Freeze) with the core operating at either 1.2 V or 1.5 V. When using it in conjunction with Actel's power analysis tools, you will have a clear picture of application power consumption at each stage in your design. In addition, the Libero Integrated Design Environment (IDE) tool suite now includes Power-Driven Layout (PDL), which can reduce the power consumption of designs up to 30 percent.
The Icicle evaluation board is the size of a small cell phone measuring 1.4 x 3.6" and supports an AGL125 IGLOO device in the 8 x 8 mm QN132 package. The evaluation board consumes less than 150 mW and can extend the life of the built-in lithium rechargeable battery seven times over that of competitive solutions. All components used on the board, such as LEDs (2 mA), resets (µA range), and oscillator (2-3 mA), including the Blue OLED (Rev D boards) or Green OLED (Rev B boards) display at 96 x 16 (0.8") pixels for quick demos, are low-power components. Also included on the evaluation board is a USB-to-UART interface to allow for Hyperterminal on a PC to communicate with the IGLOO device on the board.
Key Features:
- Low-power AGL125 in small (8 x 8 mm) portable QN132 package
- Built-in rechargeable lithium-ion battery with automatic recharge from USB interface, which also provides serial communications to the PC for a Hyperterminal use via a USB-UART chip
- Blue OLED at 96 x 16 pixels low-power display for interesting demos (Rev D boards)
- Green OLED was used on older Rev B boards
- Includes a miniature low-cost programming stick (LCPS) for programming the evaluation board via a USB 2.0 high-speed connection
- Three signal LEDs and a special Flash*Freeze indicator LED