Three weeks ago, Intel announced the mid-year 2011 availability of the first programmable embedded ATOM SoC – codenamed Stellarton – based on Altera’s FPGA technology. Earlier this year, Xilinx announced a partnership with ARM, the current de facto leader in embedded mobile systems. Both of these announcements were processor-centric, i.e., an embedded processor was tightly couple to an FPGA. (See “Intel Teams Up with Altera”)
This is not the case with today’s announcement of Microsemi’s acquisition of FPGA tool vendor Actel. Rather than a marriage of processors with FPGAs, this announcement represents a union of analog-mixed signal (AMS) and RF/Wireless chips with FPGAs. Why the difference?
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