November 26th, 2019
Aldec’s HES-MPF500-M2S150 Development Kit supports the early co-development and co-verification of hardware and software in projects targeting FPGAs from Microchip’s PolarFire and SmartFusion2 families.
Henderson, USA – Aldec, Inc., a pioneer in mixed HDL language simulation and hardware-assisted verification for FPGA and ASIC designs, has launched the HES-MPF500-M2S150 Development Kit, to aid engineers in the development of FPGA-based embedded systems that will use devices from either or both of Microchip’s PolarFire or SmartFusion2 families.
The HES-MPF500-M2S150 Development Kit is the first of its kind in the industry to carry devices from Microchip’s PolarFire and SmartFusion2 FPGA families, whereas all other development boards available carry one or the other. In addition, such single-FPGA boards carry just mid-range devices.
“This latest addition to our HES product line is in direct response to requests from customers who are in need of advanced and versatile prototyping platforms that provide easy access to one or both of Microchip’s popular FPGAs,” comments Zibi Zalewski, General Manager of Aldec’s Hardware Division. “By selecting Microchip’s largest devices from both families, we are sparing engineers from worrying about optimisation early on in their design flow. Instead, they can do their What If experimentation and address optimisation and other performance issues once they have achieved the top-level functionality they desire.”
Zalewski goes on to flag that although a design might only be targeted at the PolarFire FPGA the SmartFusion2 device can be used as an embedded host and test driver. Similarly, the PolarFire FPGA can be loaded with test vectors for verifying the design on the SmartFusion2 device.
The HES-MPF500-M2S150 Development Kit features Microchip’s low power PolarFire MPF500T FCG1152 FPGA, which has 481k logic elements, 1480 math blocks, 33Mbits of RAM, and 584 I/Os. In addition, the PolarFire family of FPGAs afford high security, which is of great benefit in the fight against cyber-crime.