I must admit that I'm impressed. The folks at Lattice Semiconductor have just announced the immediate availability of a new LatticeXP2 development kit called the Brevia Development Kit that is currently available for a promotional price of only $29 (how can they do this at this price?)

Of particular interest is the fact that this little beauty comes equipped with 28 new silicon-proven reference designs, which are ideal for developing high volume, cost sensitive, high density applications.

The LatticeXP2 family combines a Look-up Table (LUT)-based FPGA fabric with Flash non-volatile cells in Lattice’s flexiFLASH architecture.  The flexiFLASH approach provides benefits such as instant-on operation, a small footprint, on-chip storage with FlashBAK embedded block memories, serial TAG memory, and high design security.  LatticeXP2 devices also support live updates with Lattice’s TransFR technology, 128-bit AES design encryption, and dual-boot technologies.  The family provides five devices ranging between 5K and 40K LUTs in a wide variety of packages.

The instant-on, easy to use LatticeXP2 FPGA family offers users the benefits of increased system integration by providing embedded memory, built-in PLLs, high performance LVDS I/O and remote field upgrade (via TransFR technology), all in a single device.  Designed for a broad range of high density applications that include general purpose I/O expansion, video image signal processing, interface bridging and control functions, the popular LatticeXP2 FPGA family is used in a variety of end markets such as security and surveillance, consumer, displays, automotive, communications, computing, and industrial applications.

"LatticeXP2 FPGAs are a perfect platform for our broad family of Flash memory controllers, as they offer the best mix of high-speed I/O, logic capacity, embedded memory, and programmability in a very small form-factor package," said Santosh Kumar, principal systems architect at SiliconApps, a silicon applications provider for embedded systems.  "The new reference designs and the low cost development kit provide us with a complete platform for building high-speed embedded controllers, signal-processing, and video-processing systems."

"The LatticeXP2 device is the only single-chip, non-volatile SRAM-based FPGA available in a tiny 8mm x 8mm BGA package in the market," said Shakeel Peera, Lattice's Director of Strategic Marketing for High Density Solutions.  "The value priced XP2 Brevia Development Kit, along with 28 new silicon-proven reference designs, will enable designers to reduce design cost and complexity while shrinking the time to market window to build secure, instant-on systems."

About the LatticeXP2 Brevia Development Kit
The LatticeXP2 Brevia Development Kit features the LatticeXP2 LFXP2-5E-6TN144C device, 2Mb SPI Flash and 1Mb SRAM memory, expansion headers and several LEDs and user switches.  Using a preloaded system-on-chip design provided with the development kit, designers can now test within minutes UART interfaces, the 8-bit LatticeMico8 soft microcontroller, and peripheral controllers for SPI and SRAM.  Designers can then build their own designs using the free downloadable reference design source codes, implementing these features typically in less than an hour. In addition, the compact Brevia Development Kit can also be used for implementing elaborate micro-controller applications using the downloadable LatticeMico32 soft processor.

The Brevia Development Kit can be programmed using a standard parallel or USB cable.  The LatticeXP2 Brevia Development Kit includes the parallel cable for device programming and QuickStart documentation.  The associated reference designs and free ispLEVER Starter design software can be downloaded from the Lattice website, www.latticesemi.com/ispLever.

Pricing and Availability
Promotional pricing for the LatticeXP2 Brevia Development Kit is $29 for kits shipped through August 31, 2010.  The regular list price of the Brevia Development Kit will be $49 after the initial promotional period.  The kit is available for immediate ordering via the Lattice online store at www.latticesemi.com/store/dev_kits.cfm and through select authorized Lattice distributors listed at www.latticesemi.com/sales.

More information regarding the LatticeXP2 Brevia Development Kit is available at www.latticesemi.com/latticexp2-brevia.