Microchip SmartFusion
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SmartFusion is a family of microcontroller-class SoC FPGAs from Microchip Technology. The devices includes an ARM Cortex-M3 hard processor core in addition to their flash-based FPGA fabric.
SmartFusion devices
| Model number | FPGA Fabric | Microcontroller Subsystem (MSS) | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| System Gates | Tiles (D-Flip-Flops) | RAM Blocks (4,608 bits) | Flash (KB) | SRAM (KB) | |
| A2F200 | 200,000 | 4,608 | 8 | 256 | 64 |
| A2F500 | 500,000 | 11,520 | 24 | 512 | 64 |
SmartFusion2 devices
| Model number | FPGA Fabric | Microcontroller Subsystem (MSS) | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Logic Elements | Total RAM (Kb) | Flash (KB) | SRAM (KB) | |
| M2S005 | 6,060 | 191 | 128 | 64 |
| M2S010 | 12,084 | 400 | 256 | 64 |
| M2S025 | 27,696 | 592 | 256 | 64 |
| M2S050 | 56,340 | 1314 | 256 | 64 |
| M2S060 | 56,520 | 1314 | 256 | 64 |
| M2S090 | 86,316 | 2074 | 512 | 64 |
| M2S150 | 146,124 | 4488 | 512 | 64 |
Development hardware
Actel also sells two development boards that include an SmartFusion chip. One is the SmartFusion Evaluation Kit which is a low cost board with an SmartFusion A2F200 and sold for $99. Another is the SmartFusion Development Kit which is a fully featured board with an SmartFusion A2F500 and is sold for $999.
Development tools
Documentation
The amount of documentation for all ARM chips is daunting, especially for newcomers. The documentation for microcontrollers from past decades would easily be inclusive in a single document, but as chips have evolved so has the documentation grown. The total documentation is especially hard to grasp for all ARM chips since it consists of documents from the IC manufacturer (Actel) and documents from CPU core vendor (ARM Holdings).
A typical top-down documentation tree is: manufacturer website, manufacturer marketing slides, manufacturer datasheet for the exact physical chip, manufacturer detailed reference manual that describes common peripherals and aspects of a physical chip family, ARM core generic user guide, ARM core technical reference manual, ARM architecture reference manual that describes the instruction set(s).
SmartFusion documentation tree (top to bottom)
- SmartFusion website.
- SmartFusion marketing slides.
- SmartFusion datasheets.
- SmartFusion reference manuals.
- ARM core website.
- ARM core generic user guide.
- ARM core technical reference manual.
- ARM architecture reference manual.
Actel has additional documents, such as: evaluation board user manuals, application notes, getting started guides, software library documents, errata, and more. See External Links section for links to official STM32 and ARM documents.
See also
- ARM architecture, List of ARM microprocessor cores, ARM Cortex-M
- Microcontroller, List of common microcontrollers
- Embedded system, Single-board microcontroller
- FPGA
Further reading
External links
SmartFusion Official Documents
ARM Official Documents
Other
- 2014-02-22 at the Wayback Machine