Feb 9 2009
SiliconBlue Technologies today announced volume production shipments for its 65nm, SRAM-based FPGAs for handheld, ultra-low power applications. These include the iCE65L02, iCE65L04 and iCE65L08 devices with the balance of the family to follow in a few months.
The iCE family is the industry's first non-volatile FPGA optimized for the rapidly growing battery powered consumer handheld market. "Our iCE65 FPGAs provide the lowest power consumption, lowest price and smallest space while improving design and production costs - all critical requirements in the handheld consumer space," said Kapil Shankar, CEO of SiliconBlue. "We selected TSMC, the world's largest dedicated semiconductor foundry, as they give us the ability to scale to high volume rapidly, enabling our customers to ramp up production faster than with other solutions."
"We are excited that SiliconBlue is taking advantage of our 65LP CMOS process to achieve unprecedented ASIC-like logic, low power and single-chip solutions, resulting in an FPGA that is ideal for the rapidly growing consumer handheld market," said Brad Paulsen, vice president, Business Management at TSMC North America.
Consumer mobile devices are experiencing extreme convergence at unprecedented levels including PDAs, MIDs (mobile internet devices), DPFs (digital picture frames), POS (point of sale terminal), cameras, MP3 players, GPS units, game platforms, email, and internet browsers. Because these products offer functions that are not necessarily designed to work together, SiliconBlue's iCE65 devices provide a natural bridge to enable the creation of seamless new solutions using disparate ASSPs/devices.
With their unprecedented ASIC-like logic capability, SiliconBlue's iCE65 devices are single-chip, reconfigurable, SRAM-based and incorporate the company's proprietary NVCM (Non-Volatile Configuration Memory) technology, eliminating external flash PROM costs while making it easy-to-use. SiliconBlue's complete design environment includes the iCEcube™ VHDL and Verilog-based development software, the iCEman™ evaluation kit and the industry's broadest portfolio of IP and turnkey designs for handheld applications.