SiliconBlue ships iCE65 mobileFPGA devices

LONDON, UK: SiliconBlue Technologies Corporation, the low-power field-programmable gate array (FPGA) company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, the United States, has shipped production-volume quantities of its iCE65 mobileFPGA devices to over 10 customers.

In a statement, SiliconBlue Technologies claimed that it is the first startup FPGA vendor to have achieved this feat in 20 years.

SiliconBlue, founded late in 2005, announced that it is targeting its FPGAs at mobile equipment like eBook readers, mobile Internet devices, feature phones, as well as digital still-cameras – applications which have not conventionally used FPGAs owing to factors such as cost and power-consumption.

The iCE65 mobileFPGA family of devices is manufactured by using the 65-nm low-power CMOS process of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC).

Though the iCE65 mobileFPGA devices are SRAM-based, they contain a non-volatile configuration memory that does away with the need for an external flash memory, or erasable programmable read only memory (EPROM).

In order to help with consumer applications, SiliconBlue Technologies explained, the chips are available in wafer-level chip-scale package (WLCSP).

Kapil Shankar, CEO of SiliconBlue, said in the statement that much of the growth of traditional FPGAs has been propelled by the telecom boom of the 1990s and that the demand for mobile FPGA devices is increasing thanks to the fast rate of innovations taking place in he mobile-phone sector.