Industrial Ethernet interface card hosts Microsemi’s SmartFusion FPGA
The Microsemi FPGA provided the design house with a “robust platform to develop solutions with added IP protection and secure connectivity. Nine Ways Research & Development, https://nineways.co.uk/, is an intellectual property and hardware design house specialising in high-end digital design within the high-speed communications industry. Its NetFusion is an industrial Ethernet switch development board based on Microsemi’s SmartFusion2 system-on-chip (SoC) field programmable gate array (FPGA) device. NetFusion is a hardware solution specifically designed for industrial networking, site perimeter telemetry and telematics, industrial motor control, as well as other applications for industrial segment customers.
Nine Ways, the UK operation of its senior partner in Germany, MorethanIP GmbH, designed NetFusion to provide a complete platform for evaluating, developing and deploying 10/100/1000 industrial Ethernet switches, and is available in both CAT5 and fibre/small form-factor pluggable (SFP) variants. The industrially deployed, all-in-one development product uses SmartFusion2 System on Modules (SOMs).
Features of NetFusion include:
- Little or no hardware development; the development kit can be deployed as a final product, making time-to-market very short in comparison to other development kits
- A baseboard full of modern and legacy industrial interfaces for FPGA integration, ideal for multiple deployment environments
- A SOM that includes free support for Libero SoC, uCLinux and multiple IP cores
“The unique features of Microsemi’s SmartFusion2 SoC FPGA, including its reliability, security, low power, high levels of integration and reduced total cost of ownership, are ideal for a variety of industrial Ethernet applications, and we are pleased the Nine Ways team sees the high value of this device,” said Bruce Weyer, vice president and business unit manager at Microsemi.
“As a development or reference design kit, the board enables powerful features of the SmartFusion2 to be realised and made full use of in the field, particularly in the industrial environment,” said Paul Bates, CEO at Nine Ways Research & Development Ltd. “In particular, a key focus of NetFusion is the industrial networking segment where it can host various applicable industrial switches in the SmartFusion2’s FPGA fabric. NetFusion development board helps customers to develop or migrate their designs in fast changing industrial networking landscape. This coupled with SmartFusion2 features like reliability, security and low-power make the solution ideal for developing high-performance SoC FPGA based industrial applications.”
Microsemi; www.microsemi.com
Microsemi’s page on the NetFusion project; www.microsemi.com/products/fpga-soc/soc-fpga/nine-ways-netfusion and www.microsemi.com/applications/industrial/industrial-ethernet
Nine Ways Research & Development; https://nineways.co.uk/product_item/netfusion/
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