Monday, July 11, 2011

SiliconBlue Announces 16 KGate Kcell FPGAs Aimed at Mobile Imaging

Business Wire: Santa Clara, CA-based startup SiliconBlue announced sampling of iCE40 “Los Angeles” mobileFPGA family targeting mobile and tablet HD video and imaging. The new FPGA devices have capacity in range from 640 to 16K logic gates cells.

One can ask what kind of image processing is possible with so few gates? As written in comments, there are Kcells, not gates. The product brief gives few suggestions: video scaling, color space conversion, parallel to serial conversion, image rotation.

The FPGAs are made in TSMC 40nm standard CMOS process and said to be the industry’s first packaged in 2.5 x 2.5mm micro plastic BGA.

"We are proud to announce we’ve taken the next bold step with Los Angeles CMDs by extending our video performance capability for smartphones to 525 Mbps, enabling HD720p 60Hz (1280 x 720) and HD1080p 30Hz (1920 x 1080)," said Kapil Shankar, CEO of SiliconBlue

2 comments:

  1. I was wondering how they could expect us to implement some scaling or rotation with such smalls devices...
    actually these device have capacities ranging from 640 to 16k logic CELLS and not gates (see datasheet http://www.siliconbluetech.com/media/downloads/iCE40LPdatasheet.pdf).
    So it is announced to be equivalent to 30K to 800K gates devices.

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  2. With application processors becoming so powerful and mobile products under such price pressure, what place does one seriously expect FPGA-type glue logic to have? I can only think of maybe CSI2-parallel conversion.

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