Actel Drives Industry's Lowest Power FPGAs into Portable Displays
Company's Flash-based IGLOO™ Family
Enables Flexibility and Control for Estimated 3.8 Billion Small-to-Medium
LCD Panel Market
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., December 10, 2007 —
With
a continued focus on delivering low-power solutions for emerging and
high-growth portable applications,
Actel Corporation today announced the availability of flexible solutions
for liquid crystal display (LCD) control applications. The new IGLOO
Video Demo Board, LCD adaptor boards with LCD panels, the IGLOO Video
Demo Kit (IVDK) and display-related reference blocks leverage the company's
industry-leading 5 microwatt (µW) Actel IGLOO field-programmable
gate arrays (FPGAs). The company expects these offerings will be attractive
to the power-sensitive designers of portable and handheld consumer,
industrial, medical, automotive and military devices that utilize small-to-medium
LCD displays.
The portable market has seen a surge in LCD usage due to the increasing
popularity of personal media players, MP3 devices, PDAs, and digital
cameras. According to market analyst firm iSuppli, the small-to-medium
display (sub-10 inches) is the fastest growing segment of the market.
iSuppli predicts total unit shipments of small-to-medium panels to
be 3.8 billion in 2007 and 4.5 billion in 2011.
"As we address LCD display control within portable applications,
a low-power, reprogrammable solution is required to adapt to evolving
standards and technologies and deliver the desired power consumption,
footprint, and time to market. Offering 200x less static power and
more than 10x the battery life than competitive programmable logic
offerings, IGLOO dominates when power matters," said Fares Mubarak,
senior vice president of Actel Corporation.
In portable devices, LCDs can consume up to 50 percent of the application's
power budget, escalating the need for a power-efficient solution. Within
1 microsecond (µs), IGLOO devices easily enter and exit Flash*Freeze
mode where IGLOO consumes as little as 5μW while retaining the contents
of the system memory and data registers. As a result, the flash-based
IGLOO FPGA can enable both the LCD panel and the controller to function
in a power-saving mode and the LCD data and backlight to be disabled,
representing significant battery savings for LCD applications.
Unlike the ASSP display controllers they can displace, Actel's low-power
IGLOO devices can be quickly reprogrammed to adapt and support a variety
of LCD displays and changing display technologies, therefore enabling
the easy migration between panels as necessary. Further, these feature-rich
FPGAs can absorb additional glue logic and more complex LCD controls
into a single chip, thereby reducing board area.
Demonstration Platform Speeds Design for Wide Range of LCDs
Leveraging the Actel IGLOO AGL600, Actel's partner Attodyne, a design
services company specializing in video and LCDs, offers the IGLOO Video
Demo Board, which processes video signals for the LCD display. The
video input to the IGLOO Video Demo Board can be from multiple sources,
such as a CMOS camera headboard or a DVI-D input. This board can drive
the LCD panel through a 50-pin onboard connector or from an LVDS interface
through the two RJ45 connectors for Panel Standardization Working Group
(PSWG) -compliant single-/dual-channel standard panels.
Initially, three LCD adapter boards will also be made available to
demonstrate advanced LCD controller features, such as image downscaling,
alpha blending, color conversion and de-interlacing. These boards include
a 7-inch, 4.3-inch or 2.7-inch LCD panel with resolutions ranging from
480x800 to quarter video graphics array (QVGA). The adaptor boards
include the appropriate connectors, drivers and inverters to the LCD
and interfaces with the IGLOO Video Demo Board.
The IGLOO Video Demo Kit combines the Video Demo board with an LCD
adaptor board, software and demo, power supply and DVI-D cables to
enable users to rapidly start building their LCD controller applications.
"Actel's IGLOO family brings an unprecedented low-power solution
to portable LCD control applications," said Ray Page, president, Attodyne. "Our
collaboration has resulted in sophisticated and flexible solutions
that enable designers to shave months off of their design time and
will easily meet the most stringent power budgets."
Rounding out its LCD display offerings, Actel has worked with its
partners to offer a broad range of reference blocks that include video
timing generation, color conversion, single-channel LVDS transmitter,
on-screen display, alpha blending of two image/video source, frame
grabber, frame buffer, frame rate conversion, and color management
functionality.
Pricing and Availability
The IGLOO Video Demo Kit, the IGLOO Video Demo Board, the LCD adaptor
boards, and a range of display-related reference blocks are available
from partner Attodyne. For pricing information, please
contact Attodyne at www.attodyne.com.
About Actel
Attacking power consumption from both the chip and the system levels,
Actel Corporation's innovative FPGAs and programmable system chip
solutions enable power-efficient design. The company is traded on
the NASDAQ National Market under the symbol ACTL and is headquartered
at 2061 Stierlin Court, Mountain View, Calif., 94043-4655. For more
information about Actel, visit http://www.actel.com.
Contact: Stephanie Mrus, Actel Corporation, 650.318.4614
