Lattice Semiconductor Launches the Certus-N2 Small FPGA Family, Built Around the Nexus 2 Platform

New 16nm FinFET process parts deliver a claimed threefold reduction in power draw and three times the MIPI speed of the competition.

Gareth Halfacree
2 months agoFPGAs

Lattice Semiconductor has announced new small- and mid-range field-programmable gate array (FPGA) parts, the former built around the Lattice Nexus 2 platform — and delivering, the company claims, a threefold reducing in power than "similar class competitive" FPGA parts.

"At Lattice, we are proud to lead technological advancements in low power, small form factor FPGAs, ensuring our customers have the optimal devices, tools, and solutions to design groundbreaking applications that are power efficient, fast, and secure," claims Lattice's chief strategy and marketing officer Esam Elashmawi. "From the edge to the cloud across a variety of industries, FPGAs stand at the forefront of innovation, and we’re committed to delivering versatile and robust small and mid-range FPGA solutions that enable our customers and partners to unlock their full potential."

The Lattice Nexus 2 platform at the heart of the company's latest launch is built on Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC)'s 16nm FinFET process node, with Lattice claiming a range of advantages over the competition — including, by the company's own measurements, up to a threefold reduction in power draw, more than three times the MIPI speed, and an order of magnitude improvement in configuration times, in a footprint as little as one-fifth the size.

The first parts to be built on the Nexus 2 platform are the Certus-N2 FPGAs, small-scale general-purpose chips available from 64 to 220k logic cells and offering up to eight serial/deserializser (SerDes) channels offering a total of up to 128Gb/s bandwidth. The highest-end parts include 12Mb (1.5MB) of embedded memory and 520 18×18 multipliers, the company has confirmed, with all parts available in both commercial and industrial temperature grades and with integrated AES-GCM, ECDSA, and RSA cryptography and authentication engines.

To showcase the parts' potential, Lattice has designed three "example solutions:" an industrial machine vision platform with MIPI Camera Serial Interface 2 (CSI-2), LVDS, and sub-LVDS interfaces, customizable image signal processor (ISP), and 10-gigabit-Ethernet connectivity; an automotive zonal controller and gateway with low-latency switching and flexible Ethernet, sensor, and actuator port configuration; and a frame-grabber with 10-gigabit-Ethernet video input and PCI Express output plus LPDDR4 memory support for an optional frame buffer.

More information on the Certus-N2 family is available on the Lattice Semiconductor website; an evaluation board for the chips is listed as "coming soon" on a separate product page. The company has also announced new entries in its Avant family, the Avant 30 and Avant 50, with more information available on the Avant landing page; at the time of writing, Lattice had not publicly confirmed pricing.

Gareth Halfacree
Freelance journalist, technical author, hacker, tinkerer, erstwhile sysadmin. For hire: freelance@halfacree.co.uk.
Latest articles
Sponsored articles
Related articles
Latest articles
Read more
Related articles