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PORTLAND, Ore.—- Flex Logix Technologies Inc. has created a new species of product. The Mountain View, Calif. company has added field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to SoCs.

Flex Logix began with a new type of FPGA based on IP from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), which almost doubled the number of usable gates per chip. The new FPGAs eliminated more than 20% of the room needed for interconnect and switches, Co-Founder and CEO Geoff Tat told EE Times in an exclusive interview, and there is now nearly 50% more room for gates.

As the ARM of FPGAs, many of Flex Logix’s design blocks go next to ARM processor blocks for which they have prefab interface compatibility with ARM's busses and other architectural features. The FPGAs accelerate ARM, MIPs or any other microcontroller the customer is using. Plus they one-up the microcontroller IP suppliers by supplying both hardware and a programming environment that allows the customer to upgrade their FPGA in-the-field when new protocols, encryption algorithms, packet parsing methods or anything else comes along that requires re-configuring the embedded FPGA.

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