Silego, which specialises in mopping up multiple components with low-power ICs, told the Globalpress Summit Conference in Santa Cruz that it has come out with two FPGAs, a family of clocks, a DDR3 register and an nChannel MOSfet driver.
The clocks, called GreenCLK are for portable media players, camcorders, LCD and Plasma TVs, smart phones, notebook, netbook, and desktop PCs, or almost anywhere a 32.768 kHz tuning fork crystal and a MHz crystal are required.
"A lot of people in the technical community will laugh when they see this", John McDonald,
vice president of marketing and sales at Silego, told the conference, "because it’s a circuitry innovation that’s so counter-intuitive. It’s been sitting there under peoples’ noses."
Silego claims that the GreenCLK products contain the first 32.768 kHz silicon technology that is competitive with quartz in terms of size, power consumption, and frequency accuracy. The company says the over temperature accuracy from -40 to 85C is improved by more than 5x compared to a typical tuning fork crystal. During system sleep mode, GreenCLK consumes less than 2.5 µA while generating the 32.768 kHz clock.
"Silego’s GreenCLK products offer designers an alternative to tuning-fork 32.768 kHz quartz with reduce component count, more mechanical robustness, and better performance over temperature," said McDonald.
The two FPGAs are called GreenSAK and GreenPAK. PAK is for mopping up glue logic, level shifters, power on resets, volt
age monitors, microcontrollers, comparators, voltage references, PWM and passive components. GreenPAK is a one-time programmable micro-FPGA with configurable analogue components. It has been designed to operate as a stand alone IC capable of performing many 4-bit and 8-bit microcontroller applications or work in conjunction with Silego’s GreenCLK (timing) and GreenFET drivers (power sequencing) product lines to remove up to 25% of all components on larger computation and communication system boards.
"You can design faster with GreenPAK than using discrete components", said McDonald, "they are the first ICs that are able to cost effectively remove massive numbers of passive and simple active components from PCB designs improving reliability and reducing procurement issues while saving board area, power, and cost."
GreenSAK works with green PAK but, as a standalone product, targets many 4 and 8-bit microcontroller applications. The finite state machine, counters, delays, logic, comparators, ADC, voltage reference, oscillator and PWM allow for applications such as interface to sensors, LED drivers, motor controllers, touch sensing, and over-voltage protection.
They can be used to mop up power on resets, temperature sensor interface ICs, delay or timing related logic, IC support logic, and power good circuits.
The DDR3 register covers all DDR3 speed grades from 800 to 1600 MHz and voltage rails from 1.25V to 1.5V with, it is claimed, up to 40% less power consumption compared to competitive DDR3 registers.
The nChannel MOSfet, called GreenFET for advanced power sequencing is claimed to be able to do power sequencing for up to ten times less cost than anything else.