GOWIN Launches New Arora V SRAM FPGAs, Promises Faster Performance in a Lower Power Envelope

Embedded hardware specialist GOWIN Semiconductor has announced new models in its Arora field-programmable gate array (FPGA) range, bolstering the Arora V family — while promising a 30 percent boost in performance coupled with a 60 percent drop in power consumption over its earlier Arora GW2A series.

"We are excited to be offering our latest 22nm technology products for next-generation applications during our innovation phase of growth," says GOWIN's Scott Casper of the unveiling of its new Arora V FPGA chips. "The improvement in performance and speed as well as the added feature of EasyCDR will take us into solutions not realized by previous families."

That latter feature is one which GOWIN hopes will help the parts stand out from the competition: EasyCDR is designed to make it easier to receive data on an FPGA's general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins, automatically converting serial data into parallel data and avoiding the need to set a sampling clock — working for all signals with a data rate below 1Gb/s, the company claims.

The new Arora V chips, built on a 22nm process node, include 12.5Gb/s high-speed SERDES interfaces, a hard-core PCI Express (PCIe) interface, hard-core MIPI D-phy and C-phy support, DDR3 memory interfaces, and an on-board microprocessor based on the free and open RISC-V instruction set architecture.

The newly-launched parts are available with 15k, 45k, 60k, or 75k look-up tables (LUTs), GOWIN says, but it's the company's performance claims which will be of most interest: according to internal testing, the new chips are 30 percent faster than the last-generation Arora GW2A parts while drawing 60 percent less power. The company also claims the chips are more resilient than the competition, using a custom static RAM (SRAM) cell design and a Single Event Upset (SEU) handler wrapper for when errors do occur.

More information on Arora V is available on the GOWIN website, though at the time of writing the latest parts had not been listed.