Overview
Consumer and mobile products compete on battery life, size and time to market. Wearables, earbuds, smartphones, tablets and smart home devices all need to sense the world continuously, respond instantly and stay small, while their main processors must sleep to save power. Lattice iCE40 UltraPlus and CrossLink FPGAs were designed for exactly these constraints, adding always-on sensing and camera or display bridging at milliwatt-class power. BeiLuo supplies them with genuine traceability and application support.
Always-On Sensing at Low Power
The most valuable power saving in a battery product is keeping the main processor asleep. iCE40 UltraPlus provides up to 5K logic cells, 1 Mb of SPRAM, 120 Kb of block RAM and eight DSP multipliers, enough to fuse motion, heart-rate and environmental sensors, and to run simple audio and gesture pre-processing, without waking the application processor. When the pre-processing detects a real event, the FPGA wakes the processor and hands off the data. Because the FPGA configures instantly from on-chip memory and supports low-power standby, the always-on function costs only microwatts between events.
Instant-On and Flexible Logic
iCE40 devices are live almost immediately after power-up and can retain state in standby, so a product responds without the boot delay of a processor. The fabric is programmable, so the same hardware can support a new sensor or a new pre-processing algorithm through a firmware update, extending the life of the design across a fast-moving market.
Camera and Display Bridging
Mobile products often need to combine or route camera and display streams that the applications processor cannot accept directly. CrossLink integrates hardened MIPI D-PHY in an 81-ball package, so a phone or tablet can multiplex two cameras into one processor input, split a display stream, or convert between MIPI lane configurations without external bridge parts. The small footprint and low power preserve the thin profile and battery life these products demand, and the programmable fabric adds format conversion and simple pre-processing.
Adding I/O Without a Larger Processor
Where a design simply needs more I/O or glue logic, the iCE40 HX family provides a larger fabric at low power in a compact BGA. That lets a product expand its interfaces, decode addresses or bridge between components without moving to a bigger, more expensive processor.
Designing for High Volume
Consumer products are built in large volumes, so unit cost, board area and reliability all matter. The iCE40 and CrossLink families reduce the external parts count through on-chip configuration and hardened interfaces, and their toolchains and open-source support speed development. Our FAE team helps you plan the power modes, size the footprint and choose the configuration scheme so the design meets its battery and cost targets from the first prototype.