Date: 21/04/2011

FPGA development kit for $99 from Lattice Semiconductor

Lattice Semiconductor Corporation has made available the new LatticeECP3 Versa Development Kit for designing FPGA based boards for products such as Video Transmission and Repeaters, Video Image Signal Processing, Camera Controllers, Network Traffic Management and Resilient Network Construction, Solar Panel Controllers and Data Acquisition & Control. The application domains targeted includes industrial networking, industrial automation, computing, medical equipment, defense and consumer electronics. The kit is offered at a promotional price of $99. Lattice suggest this kit for embedded system developers who are looking for more than what is available in MCU and DSP based kits.

The key features of the kit includes:

Is based on Lattice ECP3 FPGAs with features such as configurable SERDES, cascadable DSP slices and high-speed DDR3 memory controllers.
The complete Versa package includes the LatticeECP3 Versa Evaluation Board, seven demonstration systems, 16 free reference designs and an evaluation license for Lattice Diamond design software for use with the Versa Kit. The demonstration systems, reference designs and Lattice Diamond software are available for free download from www.latticesemi.com/ecp3versa.
LatticeECP3 Versa Evaluation Board has both PCI Express 1.1 x1 and dual Gigabit Ethernet interfaces.
The onboard SMA connectors showcase the electrical quality of the low jitter LatticeECP3 SERDES and provide an expansion port for external modules such as SFP transceivers.

Lattice is also offering a limited quantity promotion on five comprehensive IP Suites for functions such as high-speed data transfer, Ethernet networking, high speed memory interfaces, digital signal processing and video pixel processing. The five IP Suites normally retail for an annual subscription fee of $995 each. A limited number of IP Suites licenses are available for a promotional first year subscription of only $99 each. So, for less than $200 customers can avail themselves of a Versa Kit and an IP Suite targeted for their applications.

"We are pleased to offer our customers the industry's lowest cost design platform with high end innovations - SERDES, DSP, and DDR3 - for building system, networking and controller applications," said Shakeel Peera, Director of Silicon/Solutions Marketing at Lattice Semiconductor. "Lattice is committed to providing the outstanding value of LatticeECP3 FPGAs to broader markets with design kits, reference designs, software tools and bundled IP Suites so our customers can accelerate their time to market with new products."
About the LatticeECP3 Versa Development Kit

Lattice Semiconductor has also released 1.2 version of its Lattice Diamond FPGA design software tool suite, the flagship design environment for Lattice FPGA products. Users of the new MachXO2 PLD devices can now generate complete systems based on the LatticeMico8 open source 8-bit controller core using the LatticeMico System tool, which is available with the Lattice Diamond design environment.

Diamond release 1.2 enhances support for the MachXO2 PLD family by providing preliminary silicon-based models for the recently released LCMXO2-1200 and LCMXO2-1200U devices, and by adding support for all ultra-high I/O count MachXO2 devices as well as the wafer level package needed for very high volume, cost sensitive applications.

"With these new products, our customers will be able to easily implement 8-bit embedded applications like control processing, control communications, state machine replacement and simple user interfaces within an inexpensive PLD, and still have plenty of LUTs available to integrate additional functionality," said Mike Kendrick, Lattice's Director of Software Marketing.
Expanded Support for the LatticeMico8 Embedded Controller for MachXO2 Devices

The FPGA buyers in Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) can now procure Lattice' chips from Arrow Electronics EMEA.