Lattice Semiconductor Corporation has announced the immediate availability of fifteen new reference designs and a new development kit referred to as the MachXO™ Mini Development Kit with a special promotion price of $59* for March and April 2009. The kit is ideal for prototyping high volume, cost sensitive low density applications. 

The instant-on, easy to use MachXO programmable logic device (PLD) family offers users the benefits of increased system integration by providing embedded memory, built-in PLLs, high performance LVDS I/O, remote field upgrade (TransFR™ technology) and a low power sleep mode, all in a single device. Designed for a broad range of low density applications that include general purpose I/O expansion, control, bus bridging and power-up management functions, the popular MachXO PLD family is used in a variety of end markets such as consumer, automotive, communications, computing, industrial and medical. In fact, shipments of the MachXO PLD family recently surpassed 15 million units in just over three years.

The MachXO Mini Development Kit features the MachXO LCMXO2280 device, 1Mb SPI Flash and 1Mb SRAM memory, a temperature sensor, an expansion header for I2C and SPI interfaces, and several LEDs and user switches. Using the preloaded designs provided with the development kit, designers can now test within minutes I2C, SPI and UART interfaces in addition to the 8-bit LatticeMico8™ microcontroller and low power sleep mode functionality. Designers can then build their own designs using the free downloadable reference design source codes, implementing these features in less than an hour.

The mini evaluation board can be powered up and programmed using a standard USB cable. The MachXO Mini Development Kit includes a USB cable for device programming and quickstart documentation. The associated reference designs and free ispLEVER® Starter design software can be downloaded from the Lattice website.

The MachXO family of non-volatile, infinitely reconfigurable PLD devices is designed for applications traditionally implemented using CPLDs or low-capacity FPGAs. Combining an optimized look-up table (LUT) architecture with low-cost embedded Flash process technology, the instant-on, easy to use MachXO devices are the most versatile, non-volatile PLDs for low-density applications.  Available in commercial, industrial and automotive grades, the MachXO PLDs offer 256 to 2280 look-up tables (LUTs), up to 271 user I/O and are supported in thin quad flatpack (TQFP), chip-scale BGA (csBGA) and fine-pitch thin BGA (ftBGA) packages from 100 to 324 leads. The MachXO PLDs offer a range of power supply options from 3.3V, 2.5V, 1.8V and 1.2V and can also be run off a single 3.3V core supply. 

*Promotional pricing for the MachXO Mini Development Kit is $59 for all orders received before end of 30th April 2009. Price after this date will be $89.