Renesas Electronics Introduces Ultra-Low-Power, Low-Cost FPGA Family

     Renesas Electronics, a global supplier of semiconductor solutions, announced the launch of a new family of ultra-low-cost, ultra-low-power Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) products. The ForgeFPGA  family of products will address the market's need for relatively small amounts of programmable logic, allowing designs to be used in cost-sensitive applications quickly and efficiently. The launch of this product marks Renesas' official entry into the FPGA field.

     ForgeFPGA will provide significant cost savings compared to other alternatives (including non-FPGAs) - with high integration, the product can reduce overall board and system cost, and the expected volume unit price will be well below $0.50, which can be used in the past Applications that cannot use FPGAs due to cost constraints, such as high-volume consumer and IoT applications.

     ForgeFPGA products will serve applications requiring less than 5,000 logic gates in initial device sizes of 1K and 2K look-up tables (LUTs). The standby power of the first batch of products is expected to be less than 20μA, which is about half of the power consumption of competitors' products. Users will be able to download the development software for free without paying a license fee. The software offers two development modes to suit the needs of both new and experienced FPGA developers: a "macrocell mode" that uses a schematic-based capture of the development flow, and a "HDL" mode that brings a familiar Verilog environment to experienced FPGA designers.

     The ForgeFPGA product family development team comes from Silego Technology, which was acquired by Dialog, which has launched the very successful GreenPA programmable mixed-signal device. Renesas recently completed the acquisition of Dialog and added the product to the company's product portfolio. The new FPGAs will use the same business model and infrastructure as the GreenPAK family, namely easy-to-use, free-to-download and license-free software, with global application support. Practice has proved that this model is very successful, and the shipment of GreenPAK has reached billions and is still growing.

     Steve Leibson, principal analyst at TIRIAS Research, said: “It’s great to see a traditional semiconductor player like Renesas focusing on a market that has been neglected for a long time and introducing a small form factor, low-cost FPGA that generates only microwatt-level power consumption in standby mode. Earlier this year At some point, Renesas acquired Silego through the acquisition of Dialog and is determined to continue Silego's success with its ultra-low-end GreenPAK family of programmable mixed-signal products and ultra-convenient design tools. There are billions of embedded sensors and IoT devices on the market today. , which only requires a small amount of programmable logic of about 1,000 gates. The low-end FPGA product line launched by Renesas this time will receive widespread attention from the above equipment manufacturers.”

     "We are eager to extend Renesas' excellence in the small, low-cost, programmable market to FPGAs," said Davin Lee, vice president of the Mixed Signal Business Unit, IoT and Infrastructure Business Division, Renesas Electronics. Direct communication with customers, we believe that this new product launch will attract the attention of companies of all sizes in many markets around the world.”

     Renesas plans to launch a number of "successful product portfolios", which will include new ForgeFPGA products and supporting MCU, analog, power and clock products. The "Success Portfolio" helps customers build easy-to-use architectures for different applications, simplifying the design process, and significantly reducing design risk.