Actel's eX FPGAs Selected By Eleven Engineering for Novel Wireless Ethernet Platform
Actel's Low-Power, Single-Chip eX FPGAs Provide Performance, Power
and Security Benefits to Portable Consumer Electronics
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., and EDMONTON, Alberta, July 28, 2004 —
Actel Corporation (Nasdaq: ACTL) and Eleven Engineering, a leading developer
of wireless processor ICs, today announced that Actel's low-power eX
family of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are being used in Eleven
Engineering's ETHx wireless Ethernet bridge platform. ETHx is a complete
chipset and product design package for secure driver-free 802.3-compliant
point-to-point wireless Ethernet cable replacement that is suitable for
use in low-cost consumer and commercial products at 900 MHz, 2.4 GHz
and 5.8 GHz. Actel's eX FPGAs serve as the high-speed I/O interface between
Eleven Engineering's novel XInC wireless processor and an Ethernet PHY
in the ETHx platform. With internal clock speeds in excess of 350 MHz
and clock-to-out delays as fast as 3.9 ns, Actel's eX FPGAs provide the
performance necessary to enable fast I/O throughput for Eleven Engineering's
high-speed XInC wireless processor.
"When designing our ETHx wireless Ethernet platform, we needed
a cost-effective device that could keep up with the performance levels
of our XInC wireless processor yet also maintain low-power operation.
While this combination is difficult to achieve, the antifuse architecture
of Actel's eX FPGAs solves the performance and power problem inherent
in portable applications," said John Sobota, CEO of Eleven Engineering. "As
an added benefit, Actel's eX FPGAs provide excellent security features
to fully protect our FPGA intellectual property from being copied or
reverse engineered."
Dennis Kish, vice president of marketing at Actel, said, "Eleven
Engineering's ETHx wireless Ethernet platform is a perfect example of
the high-volume, portable, consumer applications for which our nonvolatile
eX family is optimized. The eX devices achieve extremely low-power consumption
while offering high performance and enhanced security. To further benefit
portable applications, our eX FPGA family is offered in extremely small
chip-scale packages and thin quad flat packs, allowing us to fit more
logic in a much smaller area than alternative solutions, which in turn
permits our customers to offer increased portability and miniaturization
in their products."
Eleven Engineering's XInC wireless processor is a multithreaded-hardware
16-bit pipelined RISC processor with eight independent hardware threads,
each behaving as a separate processor with unrestricted access to main
memory and the peripheral bus. XInC's architecture results in outstanding
MIPS per gate efficiency and slashed time-to-market. When coupled with
an Actel eX FPGA, high-speed I/O throughput between the XInC processor
and other devices in the ETHx platform can be achieved.
About the eX Family of Devices
Offering a low-power sleep mode for extra battery power savings, the
eX family of devices is optimized for portable applications. Additionally,
the single-chip solutions are competitively priced compared with the
cost of complex programmable logic devices (CPLDs), low-density gate
array ASICs or two-chip FPGA alternatives. The eX family has been designed
into cable and xDSL modems, digital photography applications, MP3 Internet
recorders/players, personal digital assistants and digital set-top boxes.
The combination of eX with simple-to-use Actel software tools results
in faster design turns and time to market.
About Eleven Engineering
Eleven Engineering Incorporated
is a supplier of innovative wireless processors and platforms. Unlike
conventional microprocessors, Eleven's XInC wireless processors are built
from the ground up specifically for use in wireless products, making
it much more efficient than conventional serial processors in size, cost,
power consumption and time-to-market. Eleven also licenses the XInC core
to other chip makers for incorporation into their products. Eleven combines
XInC with software written by Eleven's software R&D group, and with
radio frequency transceiver chips from partner firms into bundles called
Platforms. Eleven's Platforms make it fast and easy for customers to
incorporate short-haul wireless capability into their products -- in
other words to "Make it Wireless." Eleven
has a large patent portfolio in the wireless and processor spaces. Eleven
was incorporated in 1992 and is headquartered at 10150 - 100 St., Suite
900, Edmonton, Canada, T5J 0P6. Internet: http://www.ElevenEngineering.com.
About Actel
Actel Corporation is a supplier
of innovative programmable logic solutions, including field-programmable
gate arrays (FPGAs) based on antifuse and flash technologies, high-performance
intellectual property (IP) cores, software development tools and design
services, targeted for the high-speed communications, application-specific
integrated circuit (ASIC) replacement and radiation-tolerant markets.
Founded in 1985, Actel employs more than 500 people worldwide. The
Company is traded on the Nasdaq National Market under the symbol ACTL
and is headquartered at 2061 Stierlin Court, Mountain View, CA, 94043-4655.
Telephone: 888-99-ACTEL (992-2835). Internet: http://www.actel.com.
Contact: Stephanie Mrus, Actel Corporation, 650.318.4614
