The design ecosystem round embedded FPGA (eFPGA) expertise is regularly increasing, and it’s obvious from the offers QuickLogic has just lately made within the design and manufacturing realms. The eFPGA expertise supplies system-on-chip (SoC) builders with a fast and straightforward option to embed programmable expertise into their chip designs.
The eFPGA expertise built-in into SoCs allows chip designers to implement customized logic for purposes equivalent to {hardware} acceleration, customizable I/O interfaces, and design safety. Furthermore, it extends product lifecycles by permitting the identical SoC to serve a number of market adjacencies, adapt to rising requirements, and deal with altering performance wants.
QuickLogic, a significant participant within the quickly rising eFPGA realm, will present turnkey eFPGA design assist for SoC designs to ChipMotion Microelectronics, a semiconductor design companies firm with places of work in Hefei, Shanghai, and Beijing. ChipMotion will use QuickLogic’s Australis eFPGA IP Generator, a device that creates the eFPGA IP cores from definition to supply of custom-made eFPGA IP in a extremely automated means.
ChipMotion affords SoC improvement companies for course of nodes at 12 nm and above, and whereas most semiconductor design companies companies in China solely present back-end design assist, ChipMotion affords front-end and turnkey companies as effectively.
A number of months again, QuickLogic partnered with embedded safety specialist Intrinsic ID to combine safety choices into SoCs incorporating eFPGA expertise. The safety choices embody safe key era primarily based on SRAM bodily unclonable features (PUFs) to full safety options like bitstream encryption, key wrapping, authentication tags, key verification, and knowledge encryption/decryption for storage throughout the gadget, board, or system-level communications.
Determine 1 The eFPGA expertise is including a degree of safety to its programmable logic structure to guard important IP, communications, and provide chains.
Intrinsic ID’s safety options are primarily based on PUFs, which embody the distinctive bodily traits of a selected gadget that can be utilized to generate a device-specific encryption key. For SoCs integrating eFPGA expertise, the PUF may be normal SRAM cells or FPGA logic cells particularly configured for PUF functions. Right here, the PUF offers every gadget a singular digital fingerprint, which can be utilized to generate an encryption root key every time wanted.
eFPGA’s fab liaison
QuickLogic can also be cementing fab relationships to qualify its eFPGA IP for varied course of nodes. In March 2022, the eFPGA IP provider introduced partnerships with TSMC and SkyWater. QuickLogic introduced the provision of its first customer-defined eFPGA block concentrating on TSMC’s 22-nm course of node. The IP is generated by the Australis IP Generator, which allows fast eFPGA IP era and might goal almost any foundry/course of node mixture in a couple of weeks to a couple months.
Subsequent, QuickLogic made out there a “quick boot” rad-hard eFPGA IP for SkyWater’s 90 nm rad-hard (RH90) course of. It’s value mentioning that typical discrete FPGAs and eFPGA IPs can require a whole lot of milliseconds to load their supposed configuration. Then again, QuickLogic’s eFPGA IP helps sub-100 microsecond boot occasions which might be unbiased of gate rely.
Determine 2 The eFPGA expertise is particularly appropriate for protection and different long-lifecycle purposes on account of its capability to accommodate system-level adjustments with out incurring the excessive prices of making and qualifying a brand new semiconductor gadget.
The eFPGA IP availability for fabs and course of nodes will bolster its quick and environment friendly integration into SoC designs. And its adoption by safety resolution suppliers and SoC design service suppliers exhibits that eFPGA expertise is increasing the ecosystem one deal at a time.
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