Microchip Pushes PolarFire FPGAs Into the Intelligent Edge with 10 Quickstart "Solution Stacks"
New releases come as the company prepares to launch the PolarFire 2, promising 15 times the compute capability.
Microchip has announced a push to put its PolarFire field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), and the related RISC-V-powered PolarFire SoC family, at the heart of the intelligent edge — launching 10 "solution stacks" which aim to get you up and running with real-world projects as quickly as possible.
"We're making it much easier to create industry-leading industrial and communications designs," claims Microchip's Shakeel Peera of the company's latest announcement. "And our intelligent edge focus is getting significant traction with leading system designers because they get the full benefit of PolarFire FPGA's unequalled power efficiency, security and reliability."
Designed to promote the use of PolarFire FPGAs and the PolarFire SoC system-on-chip family, the latter of which combines the low-power high-flexiblity PolarFire FPGA fabric with RISC-V processor cores, the company's "solution stacks" span three core sectors: smart embedded vision, with stacks for FPGA-accelerated H.264 video compression, HDMI, Serial Digital Interface (SDI), and CoaXpress; industrial edge, with motor control and Open Platform Communications/Unified Architecture (OPC/AU); and edge communications with software-defined radios (SDRs), USXGMII, Small Form-factor Pluggable (SFP+) optical modules, and 5G open radio access networks (ORAN).
The idea is simple: the stacks are offered as a quickstart for development geared towards a particularly tightly-focused area, and come with intellectual property (IP) blocks, reference designs, development kits — including the PolarFire SoC Icicle Kit and PolarFire SoC Video Kit, the focus of our FPGAdventures Series 1 and ongoing FPGAdventures Series 2 features respectively — and application notes. Using these, the company claims, a developer can quickly create a proof-of-concept — then take it further into a productizable design.
Links to all 10 "solution stacks" are available on the Microchip PolarFire Family portal, along with a preview of the upcoming PolarFire 2 family — adding, the company claims, a fifteenfold boost in compute capability.
