Microsemi Announces Libero SoC PolarFire v2.0 for Designing With its Lowest Power, Cost-Optimized Mid-Range FPGAs

Microsemi's Libero SoC PolarFire Design Suite provides a complete design environment for customers working on designs requiring high-speed transceivers and memories with low power consumption. It enables high productivity with its comprehensive, easy to learn, easy to adopt development tools and enables a design launching point for customers with key quick start demonstration designs for rapid evaluation and prototyping. 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 enhanced design suite also includes significant runtime improvement for SmartPower, with a 4x speed up of invocation time and almost instantaneous switching between different views. In addition, Libero SoC PolarFire v2.0 introduces a brand new SmartDesign canvas with higher quality, higher speed of displaying nets and easier design navigation.

While Microsemi's PolarFire FPGAs are ideal for a wide variety of applications within the communications, industrial and aerospace and defense markets, the new software provides new capabilities for high-speed applications, offering particular suitability for access networks, wireless infrastructure, and the defense and industry 4.0 markets. Application examples include wireline access, network edge, wireless heterogeneous networks, wireless backhaul, smart optical modules, video broadcasting, encryption and root of trust, secure wireless communications, radar and electronic warfare (EW), aircraft networking, actuation and control.

With the release of Libero SoC PolarFire v2.0, Microsemi has added support for PolarFire MPF100, MPF200, MPF300 and MPF500 devices for all package options, enabling customers to design with all members of the PolarFire family. It also adds the MPF300TS-FCG484 (STD) device to Libero Gold License and introduces the MPF100T device supported by the free Libero Silver License.  

Microsemi's PolarFire FPGA devices provide cost-effective bandwidth processing capabilities with the lowest power footprint. They feature 12.7 Gbps transceivers and offer up to 50 percent lower power than competing mid-range FPGAs, and include hardened PCIe controller cores with both endpoints and root port modes available, as well as low power transceivers. The company's complementary PolarFire Evaluation Kit is a comprehensive platform for evaluating its PolarFire FPGAs which includes a PCIe edge connector with four lanes and a demonstration design. The kit features a high-pin-count (HPC) FPGA mezzanine card (FMC), a single full-duplex lane of surface mount assemblies (SMAs), PCIe x4 fingers, dual Gigabit Ethernet RJ45 and a small form-factor pluggable (SFP) module.

Availability

Microsemi's Libero SoC PolarFire v2.0 software toolset is now available for download from Microsemi's website at https://www.microsemi.com/products/fpga-soc/design-resources/design-software/libero-soc-polarfire#downloads and its PolarFire FPGA devices are available for engineering sample ordering with standard lead times. For more information, visit https://www.microsemi.com/products/fpga-soc/design-resources/design-software/libero-soc-polarfire and www.microsemi.com/polarfire or email [email protected].

About PolarFire FPGAs

Microsemi's new cost-optimized PolarFire FPGAs deliver the industry's lowest power at mid-range densities with exceptional security and reliability. The product family features 12.7 Gbps transceivers and offer up to 50 percent lower power than competing FPGAs. Densities span from 100K to 500K logic elements (LEs) and are ideal for a wide range of applications within wireline access networks and cellular infrastructure, defense and commercial aviation markets, as well as industry 4.0 which includes the industrial automation and internet of things (IoT) markets.

PolarFire FPGAs' transceivers can support multiple serial protocols, making the products ideal for communications applications with 10Gbps Ethernet, CPRI, JESD204B, Interlaken and PCIe. In addition, the ability to implement serial gigabit Ethernet (SGMII) on GPIO enables numerous 1Gbps Ethernet links to be supported. PolarFire FPGAs also contain the most hardened security intellectual property (IP) to protect customer designs, data and supply chain. The non-volatile PolarFire product family consumes 10 times less static power than competitive devices and features an even lower standby power referred to as Flash*Freeze. For more information, visit www.microsemi.com/polarfire.

About Microsemi

Microsemi Corporation (Nasdaq: MSCC) offers a comprehensive portfolio of semiconductor and system solutions for aerospace & defense, communications, data center and industrial markets. Products include high-performance and radiation-hardened analog mixed-signal integrated circuits, FPGAs, SoCs and ASICs; power management products; timing and synchronization devices and precise time solutions, setting the world's standard for time; voice processing devices; RF solutions; discrete components; enterprise storage and communication solutions, security technologies and scalable anti-tamper products; Ethernet solutions; Power-over-Ethernet ICs and midspans; as well as custom design capabilities and services. Microsemi is headquartered in Aliso Viejo, California and has approximately 4,800 employees globally. Learn more at www.microsemi.com.

Microsemi and the Microsemi logo are registered trademarks or service marks of Microsemi Corporation and/or its affiliates. Third-party trademarks and service marks mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners.

"Safe Harbor" Statement under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995: Any statements set forth in this news release that are not entirely historical and factual in nature, including statements related to the availability of its Libero 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 FPGAs and supporting all PolarFire FPGA family devices and packages, and its potential effects on future business, are forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are based on our current expectations and are inherently subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed in the forward-looking statements. The potential risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, such factors as rapidly changing technology and product obsolescence, potential cost increases, variations in customer order preferences, weakness or competitive pricing environment of the marketplace, uncertain demand for and acceptance of the company's products, adverse circumstances in any of our end markets, results of in-process or planned development or marketing and promotional campaigns, difficulties foreseeing future demand, potential non-realization of expected orders or non-realization of backlog, product returns, product liability, and other potential unexpected business and economic conditions or adverse changes in current or expected industry conditions, difficulties and costs of protecting patents and other proprietary rights, inventory obsolescence and difficulties regarding customer qualification of products. In addition to these factors and any other factors mentioned elsewhere in this news release, the reader should refer as well to the factors, uncertainties or risks identified in the company's most recent Form 10-K and all subsequent Form 10-Q reports filed by Microsemi with the SEC. Additional risk factors may be identified from time to time in Microsemi's future filings. The forward-looking statements included in this release speak only as of the date hereof, and Microsemi does not undertake any obligation to update these forward-looking statements to reflect subsequent events or circumstances.

SOURCE Microsemi Corporation

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