Low-power FPGA startup SiliconBlue Technologies Corp. (Santa Clara, Calif.) has shipped production-volume quantities of its iCE65 mobileFPGA devices to more than 10 customers. The company claims it is the first new FPGA vendor to achieve this in 20 years.

The company, founded late 2005, is aiming its FPGAs at mobile equipment such as feature phones, eBook readers, mobile internet devices, and digital still cameras, applications that have not traditionally made use of FPGAs for reasons of cost and power consumption.

The iCE65 family of devices is made using TSMC's 65-nm low-power CMOS process. The devices are SRAM-based but include a non-volatile configuration memory, eliminating the need for an external flash memory or EPROM. To help with consumer applications the chips are available in wafer-level chip-scale package (WLCSP).

"Much as the growth of traditional FPGAs was driven by the telecom boom of the 1990s. The growth of mobile FPGA devices is being driven by the rate of innovation in today's exploding mobile consumer market," said Kapil Shankar, CEO of SiliconBlue, in a statement.

WLCSP : the Best package is NO package!

When minimizing board space in mobile applications becomes critical, designers need a programmable logic solution that not only has excellent price/performance but also comes in the smallest package possible.

The new die-sized iCE65 mobileFPGA Wafer Level Chip Scale Package solutions from SiliconBlue provide the smallest, lowest cost FPGA solution by eliminating expensive substrates and gold wire bonding. 

The iCE65L04 and iCE65L08 options offer mobile handheld designers new, small form factor solutions at 3.2mm x 3.9mm with 0.4mm ball pitch and at 4.4mm x 4.8mm with 0.5mm ball pitch, respectively. 

The combination of high-density logic and ultra-small WLCSPs provides designers the ability to integrate up to 17x more logic functionality into the same board space versus competing Flash FPGA/CPLDs.

Compared to standard surface-mount packaging, WLCSPs also provide reduced chip-to-PCB inductance and improved thermal dissipation.  In addition, all package dimensions meet industry standard JEDEC/EIAJ pitches, making them directly compatible with today’s SMT assembly and test.