标签: silego

Some time last year, the folks at Silego offered 25 free GPAK4 development kits to whoever could tempt me with the tastiest of tempting ideas for GPAK4-related projects.   I tend to think of GPAKs as teeny-tiny mixed-signal FPGAs that you can design and program in just a few minutes and that cost only a few cents each. The idea was for Embedded.com and EETimes.com community members to email me to tell me why they deserved one of these little beauties -- to excite me and delight me with descriptions of the amazing hobby or work projects for which they might feature one or more GPAK devices.   Once Silego had dispatched the development kits, it wasn't long before one of the lucky recipients -- J.R. Stoner -- showed  how to implement a GPAK-based multi-peripheral controller. Sometime later, this was followed by Wojciech (Wojtek) Rynczuk's GPAK-based light-following device.   In turn, this was followed by the release of the GPAK5 family, whose members boast on-chip asynchronous state machine (ASM) and I2C communications capabilities. And then, Victoria Yatskulyak from Silego emailed me to say: "Hi Max, take a look at this video showing an RC-controlled vehicle collision avoidance system implemented using a GPAK4 device."   How cool! I immediately responded to Victoria saying: "I love it. Can you get someone to describe this is more detail and include the GPAK4 design file so others can download it and play with it?" All of which brings us up to a few days ago, when I received the following from the guys and gals of Silego's application team:   Few activities offer such unencumbered joy as racing RC cars. Zipping through neighborhood streets with impossibly tight handling, RC cars weave around ankles and other obstacles until the inevitable miscalculation, slightest loss of traction, or lapse in depth perception leads to a collision. More often than not this means the end of the fun, a dent in the wallet, and maybe even a sore ankle or shin. But this is 2016. Modern luxury cars have collision avoidance systems, so why not RC cars? We -- the applications engineers at Silego Technology -- have devised a way to solve this issue using a fourth-generation member of Silego's flagship GPAK product, thereby saving you money, heartache, and Band-Aids. GPAK is an incredibly small, programmable, mixed-signal IC designed to implement a variety of circuits, including glue logic, timing adjustments, IO expanders, and more, thereby enabling designers to add features and differentiation to already highly integrated systems. GPAK devices are available in a wide variety of resource configurations and packages. With components like counters, delays, look-up-tables, digital comparators, PWMs, internal oscillators, and more, we were able to implement an ultrasonic collision avoidance system with the following features in the SLG46620V GPAK 4: - A remote switch to enable/disable the collision avoidance system. - Stopping distance proportional to the car's speed (throttle input). - Front LEDs to indicate system status. - Rear LED brake lights. Block diagram of collision avoidance system (Source: Silego)   Taking advantage of the easy to use GreenPAK Designer development software (shown below) the ultrasonic collision avoidance system implemented in the SLG46620V GPAK4 is organized in five main functional systems: - ECHO Ready System: Prepares the ECHO signal for comparison. - Throttle Ready System: Prepares the THROTTLE_IN signal for comparison. - Comparison: Analyzes the throttle and echo signals to trigger the stopping of the vehicle by blocking the throttle throughput. - Pulse Generator: Sends 10µs pulses every 60ms to the HC-SR04 Ultrasonic Ranging Module to trigger echo pings. - LED and Function Control: Enables the ultrasonic collision avoidance system when LED_CH_IN receives a PWM positive pulse width bigger than 1.5ms from the receiver. When the system is active, the front LEDs are fully lit and the rear LEDs are dimly lit. When the collision system is triggered (stopping the car), the rear LEDs are fully illuminated, just like the brake lights on a rear car.   GreenPAK Designer Development Software (Source: Silego)   Well, I don’t know about you, but I for one am tremendously impressed. Even though I'm familiar with advances in technology, it's still amazing to me that so much diverse functionality can be crammed into such a tiny chip.   (Source: Silego)   If you are interested in learning more about how this system was implemented, click here to visit the vehicle collision avoidance webpage where you can access an application note and the associated GPAK Designer project file. All you'll need to view the project file and tinker with the system is to download Silego's GreenPAK Designer tool, which is free on Silego.com .   If you want to go further and start programming your own GPAK4 devices, you'll need a GreenPAK 4 Development Kit ($59.99). This little rascal comes with a development board, ZIF socket, and a bunch of GPAK sample chips (I have one sitting here on my desk as I pen these words).   As for me, I'm now tempted to start playing with RC cars. I know a few guys who do this, but I don’t think any of their cars are equipped with collision avoidance capabilities. I can imagine "playing the innocent" and driving my car straight toward a wall or something, and then watching their faces when my car stopped itself. Hmmm...

Do you recall my blog Teeny-Tiny GPAK4 mixed-signal FPGAs for embedded systems . This was followed by a column from my chum Aubrey Kagan ( First impressions on Silego's GreenPAKs ). Well, I just discovered something rather interesting, but before we go there...   I don't know if I've mentioned this here on Embedded.com, but the Pleasure Dome (my office) is located in a building owned by an engineering company called MaxVision (no relation).   The folks at MaxVision specialize in creating awesome, rugged, transportable computers. Take their MaxPac 8261 XL Dual Xeon Modular Multi-Screen Workstation Family. You can configure these in all sorts of ways; for example, you can go up to 18 processor cores in each Xeon, which gives you 36 processor cores total. Furthermore, these little rascals are hyper-threaded, which means you can have two active threads per core, or 72 active threads total. Couple this with up to half a terabyte of main memory, and you can see why I refer to these beauties as "honking-big workstations."   I have to tell you that I love these beasts. This is just the sort of thing you need if you have to do a lot of high-end graphics and compute-intensive work -- like video editing and production -- away from your home base. They also find a lot of use for applications like controlling unmanned air vehicles in hostile environments (they are rated for 0°C to 50°C operation with air filters that will work in a sandstorm). They also come with two, four, six, or even ten 24" 1920x1200 screens, with touch screens as an option.   MaxPac 8261 XL two-screen configuration.   MaxPac 8261 XL three-screen configuration.   MaxPac 8261 XL six-screen configuration.   But we digress... The reason I'm waffling on about this here is that I was just chatting with an engineer who only recently joined the MaxVision team. We were in the kitchen grabbing a coffee. When our conversation turned to programmable logic, he asked if I'd ever heard of the GPAK devices from Silego.   Teeny-tinyGPAK4 mixed-signal FPGAs from Silego.   I think this engineer (who shall remain nameless) was hoping to surprise me with something new, but the tables were turned when I started spouting factoids at him. As I mentioned in my original column: The most recent addition to the GPAK family is the GPAK4 , and the first member of this fourth generation is the SLG46620V. Presented in a 20-pin STQFN package (2.0 x 3.0 x 0.55mm with an 0.4mm pitch) and supporting a supply voltage of 1.8V to 5.0V, this little rascal boasts 18 general-purpose input/outputs (GPIOs), 6 analog comparators ACMPs, 3 digital comparators/pulse-width modulators DCMPs/PWMs, 2 digital-to-analog converters (DACs), 25 lookup tables (LUTs), and a variety of counter, delay, and flip-flop macrocells.   I think I impressed him with my off-the-cuff knowledge -- it all adds to "The Mystery that is Max" (LOL). It turns out that the folks at MaxVision have started to use these tiny GPAKs to provide a vital function in their hairiest of hairy workstations, but I'm not at liberty to say more.   I asked the engineer how he'd come to hear about GPAKs in the first place.   Our conversation was drawing to a close when he said: "Funnily enough, there was a comment from a guy called Max." I didn’t respond -- I just stood there looking at him until his eyes told me that he was having a little "D'oh" moment (LOL).

Many years ago, I was asked to design a voltage to pulse-width modulation (PWM) controller. Even though microcontrollers (MCUs) were not uncommon in those days, the smallest was a 16-pin device that was presented in a DIL (dual in-line) lead through-hole package. Furthermore, although some were available with a PWM controller, there were precious few with an analog-to-digital converter (ADC), and none with both.   The MCU devices at that time were relatively pricey compared to the alternative, so I ended up with a constant current source charging a capacitor and a comparator. There was also a requirement for detecting that the motor (the PWM was driving a motor) was turning. Figure 1 shows what the resulting product looked like.   Figure 1. A voltage-to-PWM controller as part of a test jig. The H-bridge driver, driven by the PWM output, was on a mezzanine board. Ever since that time, whenever I see a small MCU, I mentally evaluate whether I could have used it for that project and how the costs would have compared. Thus, when I saw Max's column about Silego's new GPAK4 family of mixed-signal FPGAs, I was intrigued by the "mixed-signal" reference and I decided to look further into Silego's offerings. (More recently, Max posted a follow-up article --  GPAK4 mixed-signal FPGAs for embedded systems .)   As it happens, I was an early adopter of programmable logic, but I drifted away when so-called CMOS parts would happily chew many tens of milliamps (if not hundreds) and their capabilities exploded. I work in an area where simple logic and low power are the order of the day, so when I saw where the Silego GreenPAK series was positioned, I grew excited and the question of the PWM controller immediately re-surfaced.   Silego has four families named GreenPAK1 through 4. GreenPAK2 is a superset of its numerical predecessor and so I will ignore the original part. To call the GreenPAK2 an FPGA is, in my opinion, a misnomer. In fact, Silego calls it a Programmable Mixed Signal Array. To me, it is rather like the peripheral set of a microcontroller. You get an ADC, several counters (some can be used to implement finite state machines (FSMs)), an SPI interface, and several other devices including lookup tables (LUTs), delay lines, and D-type flip-flops. Like MCU peripherals, these can be reconfigured from timer to delay, number of ADC inputs and so on, but they are always there. You cannot re-allocate the chip resources for some other function. What is programmable is the interconnection between these components. I haven't spent as much time with the GreenPAK3, but it has fewer of the MCU-type peripherals like the SPI or ADC, and many more LUTs, so perhaps it does get to be more like an FPGA.   There is plenty of logic internal to these devices, but the user interface is completely graphical and pretty simple (with some quirks) and you don't need any knowledge of VHDL or Verilog. The device draws micro-amps and is about $0.55 in single units, which means it immediately got two thumbs up from me. So I proceeded to perform some evaluations to see if my PWM controller could be realised. It turns out there is an example for me to base my design on; you can see this in Figure 2.   Figure 2. A voltage-to-PWM controller represented in the GreenPAK2 Designer software. Only the components that are used are being displayed. It would be possible to detect the motor turning using a delay counter, I believe. Testing is performed using the appropriate development kit. The approach is perhaps a little dated as a result of the way the device works and how small it is. The devices are tiny. When I originally saw the data sheet that said the GreenPAK2 was presented in a 2mm x 2mm square package, it didn't really make an impression, but if you think of an 0805 resistor with 12 pins (6 a side) you'll get the idea.   This is a one-time programmable (OTP) part (I will get into this later) that has an emulator mode that allows you to download and test the part without actually programming it. The development kit has a socket that allows you to place the device (you will need tweezers and a magnifying glass) for emulation and programming. Despite its versatility, the emulator is quite intuitive and I was up and running in a matter of minutes. You don't really need external equipment like a signal generator with this tool. Ironically the configurability of the development kit is achieved with another reconfigurable device -- the PSoC3. The kit also has attachment points to allow you to wire it into your target application to see how it works in-situ.   Since the only way you can check the outputs on the kit is with the built in LEDs or with an oscilloscope, Silego also offers a third party plug-in USB oscilloscope to help with debugging. This plugs directly into the development kit and has an on board multiplexer to the four possible traces. It is an interesting concept, but to me still appears to be a work in progress (no USB cable, no user manual, trigger only on Channel 1 and more). Having said this, it is still probably worthwhile at only $69.   In my original controller, the motor required a minimum PWM (about 20%) to start turning. It is possible to adjust the PWM range in the software and -- although the design rules checker objects (requiring 0-100%) -- it will still be downloaded to the chip. So my original board of 75mm x 100mm (say 60mm x 80mm excluding the connectors, relay, and voltage regulator) would have been reduced to a 2mm x 2mm square, albeit with a sub-8-bit range on the PWM control.   I can see many possible uses for this device in my line of work. However there is one "large" drawback, and that is its size. No doubt there is one wizard out there who can hand-solder this thing, but when it comes to prototyping and possibly having to replace a part because of a flaw -- good luck! As for programming the part, there is no question in my mind that you should use Silego's services . They will program as few as 10 pieces with a $50 NRE. Your sanity is worth it.   My PCB layout technician thought the PCB with traces this fine would command a premium, and as for connecting a probe to a pin -- forget about it! I did buy a separate socket to look into making provision for it on my PCB to prove the prototype and then manufacture mounting the device directly. The footprint of the socket is 27mm x 19mm, thereby occupying 128 times more surface area than the part itself and perhaps losing one of the part's key advantages.   I have had a few interactions with Silego whilst I looked at their product, and they have been notably responsive and proactive, even suggesting that I attend an upcoming web seminar, which I recently did. Sometimes the GreenPAK2 seems to me to be an old approach (simple logic, standalone 8-bit ADC, OTP, low pin count package, low current consumption) with a very modern twist. It is positioned between discrete logic and small MCUs, and that is exactly where I work, so this is very definitely another arrow in my quiver, if only I could get the devices in a bigger package.   Incidentally Silego has a program for users to submit an app note, and the reward is rather interesting, so if you can come up with an idea, sharpen your (metaphorical) pen and start writing.   Do you think you could use one of these parts? If so, how do you feel about its size?   Aubrey Kagan

Well, this is jolly good news. Have you read my article Using GreenPAK to design, program custom chip in minutes ? The good news is that Silego Technology was recently recognised at Deloitte's 2011 Technology Fast 500 event in Menlo Park, California, as being the second fastest growing semiconductor company in North America with 1127% growth. What makes this even more impressive is the fact that that only four years ago, Silego's main "claim to fame" was creating clock chips for use in PCs. So you can only imagine their concern when they were informed by the major processor manufacturers that the chip functions Silego provided would soon be integrated into the processor chipsets. This meant that 95% of Silego's revenue was set to disappear within two years. In order to address this, Silego began its transformation from a PC Clocking company into a company that specializes in programmable mixed-signal IC products, which they refer to as CMICs (Configurable Mixed-signal ICs). Within two years, Silego's design teams had introduced not one, but four new technologies to the industry as part of the larger CMIC strategy while still servicing their legacy PC clock business. Today, Silego ships hundreds of millions of CMIC products in highly standardised packaging to numerous top-tier companies across the consumer electronics market. Despite the dreadful economy, Silego has added significant staff in their Silicon Valley location as well as opening design and technology centres in China and the Ukraine. I love to hear a success story, and my heartiest congratulations go to the folks at Silego. My personal experience is that they deserve their success based on their "can-do" and "go-getting" attitude. They are also extremely tenacious. For example, when their product marketing manager Aron Cooperman heard I was going to be at DAC this year, he called me up to arrange a meeting at which he gave me a full briefing on Silego's GreenPAK mixed-signal programmable FPGAs. Following that initial briefing, Aron and Vita Yatskulyak, Silego's worldwide marketing communications expert, hounded me unmercifully (grin) asking "Have you managed to do your write-up yet?" The thing is that I'm always juggling so many balls in the air that it's easy for things to "slide down the pile" and eventually "fall through the cracks" – so the fact that Aron and Vita kept on pinging me was what made my original GreenPAK article happen. And no sooner was that first article out of the door than Silego announced their GreenPAK 2 chips, and Aron and Vita started up again – always so kind and polite sending emails saying things like "Is there anything else you need us to provide for your write-up?" (grin). So, as I say, I think Silego's success is well deserved and I look forward to seeing what new products they come up with in the future. And if there's one thing I know I can count on, it's that Aron and Vita will make sure to keep me (and, by extension, you) in the loop (grin).