Open Up New Possibilities with Advanced System Control FPGAs

Over the past few years, we’ve seen disruptive advancements in AI models – now more than ever with the rise of generative AI tools in the market such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, and other new models being announced daily. AI models including natural language processing, computer vision, and other workloads that will drive further proliferation of AI, but this requires the system infrastructure to keep up as the system control complexity grows in parallel with memory capacity, system control interface speed, and bandwidth requirements.

The demands and importance of advanced, complex system design and system control architecture will only increase further with the significant rise in computational throughput from these technology innovations. This complexity and the related increasing demands require simplified system design and integration with secure and reliable devices.

Control FPGAs with Advanced Connectivity

Lattice has long-standing leadership in control functions with our Lattice MachXO™ line of FPGAs, which have long provided an ideal low power solution for the increasing compute demands of today’s datacenters, Communications infrastructure, and Industrial systems.

The newly introduced Lattice MachXO5T™-NX family of FPGAs extend this leadership by adding advanced connectivity capabilities, including hardened PCIe® Gen2 interfaces. This increases the control interface bandwidth (up to 5 Gbps of aggregated control signals) between the FPGA and the system’s PCIe-enabled CPU/SoC and the offload of real-time monitoring & management of other peripheral devices from these more power-hungry components to the MachXO5T-NX FPGA, yielding improved overall efficiency, compatibility, and performance in the system.

Adding the PCIe connectivity in the control FPGA family is a direct response to customer feedback around the need to expand and implement faster control functions in next-gen Computing, Industrial, and Communications applications.

Increased Logic and Memory Resources

The new MachXO5T-NX family includes two new devices with 53 k and 96 k logic cells, bringing larger capacity offerings with up to 4X more logic density and up to 4X faster control interface bandwidth to the rapidly expanding portfolio of Lattice FPGAs based on the Lattice Nexus™ platform.

Compared to comparable FPGAs in a similar class, MachXO5T-NX FPGAs provide:

• More resources and more reliability by offering up to 3.4X more embedded memory while reducing design footprints by minimizing the need for external memory,
• Up to 100X more dedicated user flash memory to store mission-critical data and parameters, and
• Up to 100X lower soft error rate, improving system reliability for safety-critical applications.

With the higher logic density, faster interfaces, larger internal memory, and advanced connectivity – the MachXO5T-NX family expands Lattice’s long-standing leadership in control FPGAs to a broader set of control function designs and applications for enterprise networking, machine vision, and industrial IoT.

A Secure and Efficient Future

Hardware enabled security is key to protecting any system control FPGA design s as the security threat landscape continues to evolve and expand. The MachXO5T-NX is equipped with AES256 bitstream encryption and ECC256 bitstream authentication to protect the integrity of system control functions. The security engine is also available during run-time to protect data exchanges between the system and the FPGA.

As designers continue seeking ways to gain efficiencies and simplify their system design and integration, enabling next-gen control functions will require faster control interface, higher logic density, larger embedded memory, all while securing performance, power efficiency, and system reliability.

Lattice MachXO5T-NX FPGAs are optimized to help solve key challenges associated with growing system management design complexity. To learn more about the MachXO5T-NX FPGAs and how Lattice can help you simplify your system design and control management, reach out to speak with the team at Lattice.