MachXO Control Development Kit

The MachXO Control Development Kit as well as 12 new reference designs, ideal for prototyping system control functions such as temperature and current monitoring, power supply sequencing, fan control and fault logging, that are commonly found in telecom infrastructure, server, industrial and medical applications is now available. The new kit offers designers of CPLDs and low-density FPGAs a comprehensive suite of board management and system control resources to enable the development of system control designs.

Designed for general purpose I/O expansion, interface bridging and power-up management functions, the instant-on, easy-to-use MachXO programmable logic device (PLD) family offers customers an "All-in-One-PLD" by providing distributed and embedded memory, built-in PLLs, high performance LVDS I/O, remote field upgrade (Lattice's TransFR technology) and a low power sleep mode, all in a single device.

"We use MachXO PLDs in our digital video recorder platform as they provide us with design flexibility and time-to-market advantages over other competitive ASIC and ASSP solutions," says Henry Zhang, chief technology officer at Zhejiang Dahua Technology. "The MachXO Control Development Kit and new reference designs will enable us to test a wide range of control-based functions in our designs and accelerate our time-to-market."

"Designers need a comprehensive set of development tools to implement their system control designs quickly and efficiently," says Gordon Hands, director of marketing for Low Density and Mixed Signal Solutions. "The new MachXO Control Development Kit and associated suite of reference designs provide designers with a complete and flexible platform that addresses board management functions typically implemented in system control applications."

The MachXO Control Development Kit
The MachXO Control Development Kit features the MachXO LCMXO2280 device, 2Mb SPI Flash and 1Mb SRAM memory, a current and temperature sensor, a Power Manager II ispPAC-POWR1014A device, an expansion header for I2C, SPI, SD and compact Flash interfaces, several LEDs and user switches. Using the preloaded system-on-chip (SoC) design provided with the development kit, designers can now test within minutes typical board control functions including fan speed control based on temperature monitoring, LCD control, comprehensive power supply monitoring and reset distribution in conjunction with the Power Manager II POWR1014A and 8-bit LatticeMico8 microcontroller. Designers can then build their own designs using the free downloadable reference design source code, implementing these features in less than an hour. Additional stand alone demos, including SD and Compact Flash memory / audio, fault logging, JTAG BSCAN and TransFR technology, can also be downloaded from the Lattice website and implemented on the control evaluation board.

The MachXO Control Development Kit includes a USB cable for device programming, AC adaptor (international plugs) and QuickSTART documentation. The associated reference designs and free ispLEVER Starter design software can be downloaded from the Lattice website, www.latticesemi.com.