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CrossLink-NX FPGAs Dominate in Competitive Testing

CrossLink-NX FPGAs Dominate in Competitive Testing
Posted 09/30/2020 by PJ Chiang

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When we originally announced our CrossLink™-NX family of FPGAs in 2019, the R&D team at Lattice performed a number of benchmarks to confirm that these devices really were as good as we thought they were. Well, the latest results are in and... CrossLink-NX FPGAs, which are based on the Lattice Nexus™ platform, are even better than we expected!

The Nexus Platform

As a brief reminder, Lattice's Nexus platform is based on 28 nm fully depleted silicon-on-insulator (FD-SOI) process. This process delivers two significant advantages -- radiation resiliency and power/performance flexibility -- both of which provide huge differentiators in the SRAM-based FPGA market.

Since the FD-SOI process is deployed fully depleted, it's more resilient to radiation effects like single event upsets (SEUs) and single event transients (SETs). Furthermore, the FD-SOI process is immune to single event latch-up (SEL) conditions, which means there is no down-time in mission-critical situations that would normally demand a power cycle to exit the latch-up state. With regard to power/performance flexibility, by varying the biasing of the substrate on Nexus FPGAs, developers can decide whether they wish to run in high-performance (HP) or low-power (LP) mode.

CrossLink-NX FPGAs

CrossLink-NX is the first of Lattice's FPGA families to be implemented using the Nexus platform. Featuring best-in-class low power MIPI D-PHY performance (MIPI being a popular I/O standard for use in AI and ML applications requiring the processing of image data), the CrossLink-NX FPGA family was specifically designed to enable smart vision and embedded video applications. For the purposes of this blog, we will consider three of the competitive advantages provided by CrossLink-NX FPGAs and show how these devices outperform the competition in terms of low-power, instant-on, and radiation tolerance.

Low-Power: Minimizing power consumption is extremely important, especially in the case of mobile, hand-held, battery-powered devices, and in devices located at the edge of the Internet of Things (IoT).

To confirm the power advantage of CrossLink-NX FPGAs, Lattice engineers compared a CrossLink-NX-40 device to the closest comparable devices from our competitors -- namely a Xilinx Spartan-7 50 and an Intel Cyclone 10LP 40.

Table 1: CrossLink-NX FPGAs provide up to 75% power reduction as compared to competitor offerings.
Table 1: CrossLink-NX FPGAs provide up to 75% power reduction as compared to competitor offerings.

The results, summarized in Table 1 show that CrossLink-NX FPGAs provide up to a 75 percent power reduction in comparison to the competition.

Instant-On: There are two things to consider with regard to the time it takes for an SRAM-based FPGA to be powered up -- the time for the inputs/outputs (I/Os) to be configured (a.k.a. I/O Configuration) and the time it takes for the programmable fabric to be configured from an external flash memory device (a.k.a. Self-Configuration).

Since FPGAs are often used in a first-on, last-off role to control the power-sequencing of other components in the system, it’s important that their I/Os achieve stable configuration as soon as possible.

To confirm the configuration speed advantage of CrossLink-NX FPGAs, we compared a CrossLink-NX device a Xilinx Spartan-7 and an Intel Cyclone 10LP.

Table 2: CrossLink-NX FPGAs provide up to 55x better I/O configuration instant-on as compared to competitor offerings.
Table 2: CrossLink-NX FPGAs provide up to 55x better I/O configuration instant-on as compared to competitor offerings.

The results summarized in Table 2 show that -- based on both an analysis of the competitors’ datasheets and a head-to-head demonstration -- CrossLink-NX FPGAs provide up to 55x better instant-on time with regard to their I/O configuration and up to 21x better instant-on time with regard to their self-configuration.

Radiation Tolerance: Radiation-induced errors like single event upsets -- in which a register element or a memory cell flips from a logic 0 to a logic 1, or vice versa -- are referred to as “soft errors” because they can be corrected.

In the context of this paper, the soft error rate (SER) is the rate at which a device encounters soft errors caused by radiation. Designers of mission-critical and safety-critical systems express the SER in terms of the number of failures-in-time (FIT) rate. The FIT rate of a device is the number of failures that can be expected in one billion (109) device-hours of operation, (e.g., 1 device for a billion hours, 1000 devices for 1 million hours each, 1 million devices for 1000 hours each, or some other combination thereof).

To confirm the radiation tolerance advantage of CrossLink-NX FPGAs, we compared a CrossLink-NX device to the closest comparable device from one of our competitors in the form of a Xilinx Spartan-7 (unfortunately SER data for the Altera Cyclone 10LP is not available to us at this time).

Table 3: Real-world test data shows the CrossLink-NX FPGAs provide well over 100x better SER (FIT) performance.
Table 3: Real-world test data shows the CrossLink-NX FPGAs provide well over 100x better SER (FIT) performance.

The results summarized in Table 3 show that CrossLink-NX FPGAs provide well over 100x better “raw” SER (FIT) performance. However, there is more to this story, because CrossLink-NX FPGAs augment the radiation tolerant FD-SOI process with additional technologies that benefit reliability like error-correcting code (ECC) memory, soft error detection (SED), and soft error correction (SEC).

In other CrossLink-NX news, Lattice is proud to announce that the CrossLink-NX family of FPGAs won the 2020 Embedded Solution Product of the Year award at the Electronic Industry Awards. Lattice would like to thank the Electronics Industry Awards for recognizing the CrossLink-NX FPGA for its versatility and the superior value it brings to the marketplace.

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