Reference designs accelerate time-to-market

Reference designs enable the quick and efficient design and deployment of commonly used functions such as general-purpose I/O expander, I2C bus master/slave, LCD controller and SD Flash controller, as well as other interfaces, in a variety of markets including consumer, communications, computing, industrial and medical.

The reference designs, coupled with complete documentation and design source code, are fully customisable.

Liang Shu Qiang, hardware manager at Raisecom Technology, said: 'We utilised Lattice's I2C controller reference design using MachXO PLDs in our Ethernet Access product.

'Lattice's reference designs and easy-to-use development kits allowed us to design and validate a range of functions, enabling us to get to market quickly,' he added.

Reference designs provide a good starting point for designers to begin prototyping their designs.

Each reference design consists of comprehensive documentation along with HDL source code (Verilog and/or VHDL) and test benches, many of which have been pre-implemented and validated using Lattice's low-cost development kits.

Reference designs optimised for control applications, including I/O expansion, interface bridging, level translation and power-up sequencing using the MachXO family, have been validated using the MachXO Mini Development Kit, an easy-to-use, low-cost platform that accelerates the evaluation of MachXO PLDs.

Using the preloaded mini system-on-chip (mini SoC) design provided with the development kit, designers can test within minutes I2C, SPI and UART interfaces in addition to the eight-bit Latticemico8 microcontroller and low-power sleep-mode functionality.

Designers can rebuild these demonstration designs using the free downloadable reference design source codes in less than one hour.

This provides a known starting point for designers' own design explorations.

Alternatively, designers targeting low-power applications can use reference designs optimised for the IspMach 4000ZE family that have been fully tested and verified using the IspMach 4000ZE Pico Development Kit, a battery-powered, low-cost platform to accelerate the evaluation of IspMach 4000ZE CPLDs.

Using the preloaded IspMach 4000ZE Pico Power demo design provided with the development kit, designers can test I2C master and LCD controller interfaces in addition to the embedded IspMach 4000ZE oscillator timer, then build their own designs using the free downloadable reference design source code.