Altium announced support for Lattice Semiconductor’s LatticeEC and LatticeECP FPGA devices as part of its Service Pack 4 (SP4) for Altium Designer. This support for LatticeEC/ECP devices also enhances the ability of engineers to develop an extensive range of devices using the same programmable design platform. In addition a range of LatticeEC/ECP-equipped daughter boards which plug into Altium’s FPGA-based development platform, the NanoBoard-NB1, will be available later in the year allowing a full interactive system development with Lat ticeEC/ECP devices. The first of the upcoming LatticeEC/ECP daughter boards will incorporate a LFEC20E-4F484C FPGA. This device includes 424K bits of embedded RAM, 19.2 K LUT4s, four phase-locked loops (PLLs), support for DDR memory, and a range of I/O standards. In addition, the daughter board includes 16M x 32-bit of SDRAM sharing address and data buses with 256K x 32-bit of SRAM, as well as two independent 256K x 16-bit SRAMS that can be configured in a variety of ways in the FPGA.

The new daughter board will plug into Altium’s NanoBoard-NB1, which interfaces to Altium Designer and allows the interactive development of complete embedded systems, including processor-based designs, on an FPGA platform. Altium Designer’s interactive development methodology, called LiveDesign, enables real-time communication with active devices in the circuit, such as processor cores and virtual instruments, that are running inside the target FPGA. The NanoBoard and target daughter boards act as a nano-level breadboard that allows ‘live’ development and interactive debugging of both hardware and software without the need for simulation at system level.

With the release of Service Pack 4, announced in June 2005, Altium provides full design support for the LatticeEC/ECP FPGA device family in its Altium Designer system. The FPGA-based components supplied with Altium Designer, including its range of processor cores and peripheral devices, have been pre-synthesized and pre-verified to support all target devices, including LatticeEC/ECP FPGAs.

Pricing and availability

LatticeEC/ECP device support is available immediately as part of SP4 for Altium Designer. SP4 is available free to all Altium customers with an Altium Designer 2004 license. Altium’s LatticeEC/ECP daughter board will be available later this year. Altium’s NanoBoard-NB1 is priced at US$995 and is currently delivered with two daughter boards, including Altera’s Cyclone and Xilinx’s Spartan-IIE.