October 2007

Lattice Showcases Design Solutions at the Embedded Systems Conference

With over 3000 attendees, the Embedded Systems Conference at Boston’s Hynes Auditorium September 19-20 was an excellent venue for Lattice to demonstrate its award winning 90nm FPGAs, including the low-cost LatticeECP2M Family, 2007’s Product of the Year.

“Lattice continues to expand its product portfolio with innovative silicon, software and intellectual property cores,” said Stan Kopec, corporate vice president of marketing.  “The ESC was a great opportunity for attendees to view demonstrations and to discuss them with our technical applications personnel.”

The Lattice booth was a busy place at the Embedded Systems Conference

Several of Lattice’s innovative design solutions were featured at the ESC, including:

• High bandwidth transfers, from card-to-system and system-to-card, executed on an x4 capable link by the PLDA XpressLite PCI Express IP core with Scatter-Gather DMA incorporated into the LatticeECP2M FPGA.
• Lattice’s Tri-Speed Ethernet Media Access Controller IP (TSMAC) and the LatticeMico32 open source soft microprocessor, both contained on a LatticeECP2 FPGA. The soft microprocessor ran a web server and a TCP/IP stack, while the TSMAC IP performed real world 802.3 Ethernet frame reception and transmission with basic MAC functions.
• Standard Definition and High Definition signals were alternately passed to a LatticeECP2M FPGA. The FPGA determined which standard it was receiving and switched SERDES receivers, PCS and PLL’s to the proper receive mode and frequency, and then processed the video data, generating the required horizontal and vertical sync signals.

The Lattice booth was consistently busy throughout the conference, and there’s no doubt that many of the attendees now understand why the press is calling Lattice the “Third Force” in FPGAs.