Date: 01/12/2017

Microsemi announced version 2 of its Libero FPGA software

Microsemi has made available of its Libero system-on-chip (SoC) PolarFire version 2.0 comprehensive design software tool suite, used for the development of the company's lowest power, cost-optimized mid-range PolarFire field programmable gate array (FPGAs) and supporting all PolarFire FPGA family devices and packages.

Microsemi said "Several full design files for Libero SoC PolarFire targeting the company's complementary PolarFire Evaluation Kit are also available, including JESD204B Interface, PCI Express (PCIe) Endpoint, 10GBASE-R Ethernet, digital signal processing (DSP) finite impulse response (FIR) filter and multi-rate transceiver demonstration, with additional reference designs planned over the coming months."

"Our Libero SoC PolarFire v2.0 release supports all of the PolarFire product family's devices and packages, enabling customers to further leverage the high-performance capabilities of our lowest power, cost-optimized mid-range FPGAs for their designs," said Jim Davis, vice president of software engineering at Microsemi. "Feature enhancements to best-in-class debug tool SmartDebug provide the ability to evaluate transceiver performance while modifying transceiver lane signal integrity parameters on the fly, and to evaluate the channel noise of the transceiver receiver through the eye monitor. In addition, the demonstration mode allows customers to evaluate SmartDebug features without connecting to a hardware board—a capability unique to Microsemi FPGAs."

The new version boasts run time improvement; 4x speed up of invocation time and almost instantaneous switching between different views. Version 2.0 also introduces a brand new SmartDesign canvas with higher quality, higher speed of displaying nets and easier design navigation.