Actel's high capacity FPGA line sets new speed standard; industry-leading performance supports high speed networking, graphics and memory applications.

SUNNYVALE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 30, 1995--Actel Corp. announced today the fastest high capacity field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) in the industry.

The new higher speed ACT 3 devices, identified with a "-3" marking, offer 1,500 to 10,000 gates supporting networking and graphics applications up to 150 MHz and DRAM and DMA controllers up to 75 MHz. Offering up to 250 MHz clock rates, the "-3" speed grade devices are twice as fast as ACT 3 standard speed devices.

"The ACT 3 family is tailor-made for high speed, high capacity designs," said Bruce Weyer, FPGA product marketing manager. "With 250 MHz serial communications and datapath performance, over 100 MHz chip-to-chip performance and 7.5 ns clock-to-out speed, the ACT 3 family has been optimized for synchronous design methodologies, which are common in high capacity designs."

Driven by hard-wired, low-skew clock networks, the ACT 3 array and I/O modules guarantee clock rates independent of gate utilization. Dedicated input and output registers account for the product line's high clock-to-output speeds. Typical applications include RISC processor datapaths, high-speed pipelined data flows, multiple bus-wide interconnects and high-speed serial data encode/decode.

New Packaging Options

Actel also introduced a wide range of new packaging options. Devices up to 4000 gates are now available in 100-pin very-thin quad flat packs (VQFP) as well as 84-pin plastic leaded chip carriers (PLCC). The VQFP package is only 1 mm high and offers a 40 percent board space savings over the traditional plastic quad flat pack (PQFP). The compact package supports PCMCIA Type I, II and III card designs.

"The ACT 3 family's unique combination of speed and dense packaging offers very fast time to market for applications such as 100Mbit Ethernet PCMCIA cards, high speed graphic cards and other space constrained applications," stated Weyer.

Actel also offers its 4000- and 6000-gate parts in a 176-pin TQFP. The TQFP supports Type II and Type III PCMCIA card designs. The 6000-gate A1460A is also available in a 160-pin PQFP or a 225-pin ball-grid array (BGA).

Packaging options for Actel's highest density FPGA, the 10,000-gate A14100A, include a 208-pin RQFP (a PQFP package with a heat dissipation slug) and a 313-pin BGA.

The 2500 gate A1425A-3 and 6000-gate A1460A-3 devices are available in the first quarter of 1995, starting at $56 each for high volume quantities. The A1415A-3, A1440A-3 and A14100A-3 devices will be available in the first half of 1995.

Software Support

To simplify logic implementation, Actel supplies its Designer and Designer Advantage software. The systems offer Microsoft Windows and X-Window graphical user interfaces and integrate with popular CAE systems to provide a complete design environment supporting schematic capture, high-level design, simulation, fully automatic placement and routing, and timing verification. The systems also feature the ACTgen Macro Builder, a powerful macro function generator for generating counters, adders and other structured blocks, and the ACTmap optimization and synthesis tool. The software is supported on 386/486/Pentium-based PCs and HP and Sun workstations running CAE and high-level design tools, including those offered by Cadence, Data I/O, Examplar Logic, IST, Mentor Graphics, OrCAD, Synopsys, and Viewlogic.

About Actel

Actel is the leading supplier of antifuse-based FPGAs and associated CAE software development systems and programming hardware. Actel antifuse FPGAs are used by designers of telecommunication, industrial, computer and space systems to differentiate their products, reduce time to market and development costs, and improve system size and performance.

The company is located at 955 E. Arques Ave., Sunnyvale, CA 94086. Telephone [phone].

CONTACT: Actel Corp.

Rick Bowman, 408/739-1010 (Media contact)

Bruce Weyer, 408/739-1010 (Reader contact)

Alliance Public Relations

Matthew Quint, 510/651-9744

Christine Rendulich, 408/748-0293