Microsemi Announces Cost-Effective SmartFusion cSoC Devices

A cost-effective solution ideal for industrial, communications, medical, and military/aerospace applications.

September 6, 2011 – Microsemi Corporation (NASDAQ: MSCC), a leading provider of semiconductor solutions for differentiated power, security, reliability and performance, today announced the introduction of its cost-effective SmartFusion® customizable system-on-chip (cSoC) device. The device (product name: A2F060) is available in commercial and industrial temperature ranges and is designed for high-volume applications such as motor and motion control, gaming, solar inverters, and clinic and imaging medical electronics.

“By extending our award-winning SmartFusion family, we’ve been able to address the performance and cost challenges across a broad range of embedded systems while maintaining core functionality,” said Rich Kapusta, vice president and general manager of Microsemi’s SoC Products Group. “By standardizing on our highly integrated SmartFusion platform, customers can realize a broad spectrum of low-end to high-end systems without compromising performance.”

The latest member of Microsemi's cSoC portfolio, the A2F060 device features a hardened 100 MHz 32-bit ARM® Cortex™-M3-based microcontroller subsystem with 60,000 system gates, 128 Kb of embedded flash and 16 Kb of embedded SRAM, as well as programmable analog including one ADC, one DAC, and two comparators. Additionally, the following features are included:

Microcontroller subsystem
• 100 MHz, 125 DMIPS throughput with 128 Kbytes flash and 16 Kbytes SRAM
• Dedicated external memory controllers, two each: SPI, UART, and 32-bit timer

Programmable analog
• One 12-bit SAR ADC with up to 11 channels and 500Ksps speed, including 8/10-bit mode, sample, and hold function
• One 12-bit sigma-delta DAC with 500Ksps update rate
• Includes two clock conditioning circuits (CCC), one PLL with phase shift, multiplication/division, and delay functions: provides an input frequency range of 1.5 to 350 MHz
• Two bipolar high-voltage monitors with 1% accuracy (four input ranges from +/-2.5 V to -11.5/+14 V)

FPGA fabric
• 350 MHz system performance: 60 K system gates and 36 Kb SRAM
• Create additional standard or proprietary interfaces using high-speed FPGA I/O and gates
• Provides up to 107 user I/Os, including FPGA, microcontroller GPIO, and analog I/O

Microsemi's SmartFusion cSoCs are the industry's only devices that integrate 1) an FPGA, 2) an integrated microcontroller based on a hardened ARM Cortex-M3 processor, and 3) programmable analog, enabling true customization while also providing IP protection and ease of use. SmartFusion devices are built on Microsemi's proprietary flash process. Therefore, it is ideal for hardware and embedded designers who desperately need highly integrated SoCs with significantly more flexible performance than traditional fixed-function microcontrollers. This product dramatically reduces the cost of soft processor cores in traditional FPGAs.

Price and Supply
The SmartFusion A2F060 device is available in the FG256 and CS288 packages, which are ROHS-compliant. Microsemi offers development and evaluation kits based on a large family of products that enable rapid prototyping vehicles. An evaluation kit based on the A2F200 device is available for $99 (A2F-EVAL-KIT), and a development kit based on the A2F500 device is available for $999 (A2F500-DEV-KIT).