In the latest edition of its Altium Designer suite, Altium has provided support for the LatticeSC and LatticeSCM (collectively, the LatticeSC/M) families of high-performance FPGA devices from Lattice Semiconductor.
The LatticeSC/M families are the latest FPGAs in the growing list of devices from all major vendors that can be programmed using Altium Designer. Developers using the Altium Designer environment can now target designs for LatticeSC/M devices with full synthesis support. The extensive range of pre-synthesized, ready-to-use FPGA-based components that come standard with Altium Designer, including high-level processor and peripheral cores, can be used to develop complete systems on the high-performance LatticeSC/M FPGAs. The unified Altium Designer system also supports the development of systems right through to board design and production within the same environment.
This unified design approach reduces the time required to bring products to market. It helps remove the barriers often found within design teams trying to design a single product using multiple toolsets. And unified design also extends the skills of both embedded and board-level designers, by making it easy to move the functionality of designs into software and programming FPGAs to run the application. This helps build and protect intellectual property in the ‘soft domain’ instead of in hardware, which is easily copied.
Altium Designer’s unified design environment also allows designers to retarget the programmable elements of a design to a range of different processor platforms, both FPGA-hosted and discrete, during development without significant software or hardware rework. This means that crucial application architecture decisions can remain open until much later in the development cycle than is currently possible.
LatticeSC/SCM-based daughter boards for Altium’s Desktop NanoBoard reconfigurable hardware platform are currently in development. The Desktop NanoBoard provides a vendor-neutral development platform that features plug-in FPGA daughter boards to house the target devices as well as interchangeable peripheral boards.
Support for the LatticeSC/M family will be available to all Altium Designer 6 license holders in the next update. Altium Designer 6 is available for immediate purchase through Altium’s sales and support centers worldwide. Contact local Altium sales representatives for pricing and delivery information.
Altium
Lattice Semiconductor