Actel Adds Analog
There's Fusion in our Future

Myopia is one of the few unfortunate consequences of specialization. While focus, refinement, and evolution deliver us some of our most impressive efficiencies, indiscriminate rule breaking is more often the root of spectacular progress. We walk along in our well-walled worlds day-to-day, carefully categorizing concepts like “Field Programmable Gate Array,” “Structured and Platform ASIC,” and “Programmable System on Chip,” and we forget to color outside the lines occasionally, just to see what happens.

Actel announced its new Fusion architecture this week, and somebody clearly went a little crazy with the coloring book. When we digitally-blinded folks consider the construction of future “Systems on Chip” we are all too happy to overlook the analog part of our system. Somewhere in the back of our minds, we know that the real “System” includes lots of things we typically don’t discuss, like power supplies, mechanical parts, antennae, and other components designed by people who probably flunked out on Karnaugh maps and had to settle for one of the less prestigious branches of engineering. Disregard the fact that we never quite completely understood Laplace transforms or that we still shiver at the idea of a transistor that’s lost its way somewhere between saturation and depletion. Deep down, we probably feel safer pretending that analog really isn’t involved.

Now that Actel has announced its upcoming Fusion family of FPGAs with interesting amounts of built-in analog, we must all reconsider our definitions and re-establish our comfort zone. Fortunately for us, Fusion also carries with it a well-conceived design environment and methodology that will simplify the task of assembling a single-chip, mixed-signal FPGA system with built-in volatile and non-volatile memory. Unfortunately for us, we’ve got “6 to 9 months” to get used to the idea. [more]

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