Actel FPGA Design Services

Verien Design Group provides Actel FPGA design services, as well as analog and board-level designs for a wide variety of markets. Verien's founder, Dave Matthews, has been designing Actel FPGAs since the Act 2 family, around 1994, and more recently has designed with the latest ProASIC3 family.

Over the years, we have seen a steady migration from masked ASICs to FPGAs, as FPGAs increased in density and decreased proportionally in cost. The FPGAs of today are very different from the "glue-logic" FPGAs of yesterday; entire systems can be integrated in a single FPGA. Whereas we used to design the glue logic that binded the system together, today we are designing the whole system in the FPGA. Today, a typical Actel system on a chip can include an embedded processor, analog blocks, Ethernet and other hard IP peripherals, as well as the clients proprietary application in the FPGA fabric. Having the processor in the FPGA changes the nature of the design implementation in that the border between hardware and software is blurred - if a portion of the application is too demanding to accomplish in the processor, it can be moved to the FPGA fabric. Actel devices are well suited to these applications, especially with the hard IP ARM processor and analog blocks in the SmartFusion family.

The following sections describe some aspects of our Actel design services:

• High Performance Designs - With direct design experience at clock rates of 100, 133, 160 and 200 MHz, we know how to achieve timing closure for your design. See our high performance design notes for tips on how we achieve this.
  
  

• Cost Sensitive Designs - We've designed cost-sensitive consumer level products, products that have shipped over 100,000 units, and products that have shipped in the 100's. There are applications where pennies count, and applications where a higher cost allocated for future expansion in the FPGA fabric is prudent. The Actel ProASIC3 and Igloo family devices are well suited to cost sensitive designs.
  
  

• Analog Design - Verien's analog engineer, Geoff Legg, brings over 40 years of analog design experience to a project. With both analog and FPGA expertise, Verien is well suited to deliver a mixed-signal SmartFusion or Fusion family design.
  
  

• Embedded Designs - Actel offers the ARM processor in both soft and hard IP form, depending upon the FPGA family. Verien has completed multiple embedded FPGA designs at this point and can deliver a working embedded design with your requirements.
  
  

• Board-Level Design Services - Verien has provided board-level designs for products ranging from 30 components to 1000 components. Past examples include mixed signal designs with isolated power and ground schemes, gigabit high-speed differential pairs, A/D and D/A converters, power supplies, and with many other design specifics.
  
  

• Turnkey Board Services - In addition to board-level design services, Verien can provide layout, fabrication, component procurement, assembly using partner services, and debug in our lab.
  
  

• Additional services include ASIC to FPGA, and FPGA to FPGA retargetting, custom IP development, and on-site design reviews.
  
  

• DSP designs using MATLAB or conversion from C source
  
  
• Embedded processor designs including PowerPC, Virtex-5 embedded PowerPC440, Microblaze, Intel, ARM7, ARM9, AMD, TI or ADI DSP, Picoblaze
  
  
• Custom communication designs at 125 Mbps to 1.2 Gbps with hardware data link layer
  
  
• Image acquisition, and video and image processing
  
  
• Mixed signal Data Acquisition Systems
  
  
• PCI Express (COM Express)
  
  
• Infrared, CCD and CMOS camera design
  
  
• Motion control systems
  
  
• Controller Area Network (CAN), I²C, SPI (Serial Peripheral Interface)
  
  
• Digital Audio (MADI, S/PDIF)