Lattice Semiconductor continues to target industry-specific needs with its Nexus FPGA platform, having just unveiled the Lattice Certus-NX FPGA family optimized for automotive applications, such as infotainment, advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), and safety-focused functions.
The automotive industry has been among the hardest hit by the ongoing chip shortage, but that hasn’t stopped demand from growing or automotive engineers from continuing to innovate and aim for greater performance and reliability in their in-car systems.
“Cars are pretty much becoming data centers on wheels,” said Deepak Boppana, senior director of segments and solutions marketing at Lattice. “Things like AI and new security requirements are emerging, and every time there are emerging trends and disruptions in markets like automotive, it opens up opportunities for us.”
Boppana said Lattice is at an advantage as a supplier of general-purpose FPGA architectures against the providers of MCUs with sector-specific architectures who may feel more acutely the effects of the supply chain constraints. Still, even with the major automakers trying to get their supply chains to move faster, it could be another two years before the automotive family announced this week by Lattice has significant market impact.
That said, the Certus-NX FPGAs are aiming to offer something above and beyond what similar FPGAs are offering for automotive use cases.
The Certus-NX devices combine Lattice’s standard-bearing low power consumption, which is up to 4x lower than similar FPGAs, with programmability that allows users to select high-performance or low-power operating modes, depending on the needs of the application. The small form factor – up to 3x smaller with up to 2x the I/O density per mm compared to other FPGAs, Lattice claimed -- also features “ultra-fast device configuration from SPI memory, with individual I/Os able to configure in just 3 milliseconds and full-device startup in only 8-14 milliseconds.
It also has a robust library of I/O interfacing capabilities -- 1.5 Gbps differential I/O, 5 Gbps PCIe, 1.5 Gbps SGMII, and 1066 Mbps DDR3. Certus-NX FPGAs also are AEC-Q100 qualified and provide up to 100x better soft-error rate (SER) performance than similar FPGAs.
Particular attention has been paid to authentication and encryption as concerns about attacks on in-car computing systems have increased, Boppana said. The Certus-NX FPGAs support AES-256 encryption with ECDSA.
“Security standards are still evolving, so we are keeping an eye on that and what we will need to support in the future,” Boppana added.
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