Actel Corporation (formerly

NASDAQ The Nasdaq Stock Market () (National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations Stock Market) is an American stock exchange based in New York City. It is the most active stock trading venue in the US by volume, and ranked second ...

:ACTL) was an American manufacturer of nonvolatile, low-power field-programmable gate arrays (

FPGA A field-programmable gate array (FPGA) is an integrated circuit designed to be configured by a customer or a designer after manufacturinghence the term '' field-programmable''. The FPGA configuration is generally specified using a hardware de ...

s), mixed-signal FPGAs, and programmable logic solutions. It was headquartered in

Mountain View, California Mountain View is a city in Santa Clara County, California, United States. Named for its views of the Santa Cruz Mountains, it has a population of 82,376. Mountain View was integral to the early history and growth of Silicon Valley, and is the ...

, with offices worldwide. In November 2010, Actel was acquired by

Microsemi Microsemi Corporation was an Aliso Viejo, California-based provider of semiconductor and system solutions for aerospace & defense, communications, data center and industrial markets. In February 2018, it was announced that Chandler, Arizona-base ...

for $430 million.

History and competition

Actel was founded in 1985 and became known for its high-reliability and

antifuse An antifuse is an electrical device that performs the opposite function to a fuse. Whereas a fuse starts with a low resistance and is designed to permanently break an electrically conductive path (typically when the current through the path exceeds ...

-based FPGAs, used in the military and aerospace markets. In 2000, Actel acquired GateField which expanded Actel's antifuse FPGA offering to include flash-based FPGAs. In 2004, Actel announced it had shipped the one-millionth unit of its flash-based ProASIC^PLUS FPGA. In 2005, Actel introduced a new technology known as Fusion to bring FPGA programmability to mixed-signal solutions. Fusion was the first technology to integrate mixed-signal analog capabilities with flash memory and FPGA fabric in a monolithic device. In 2006, to address the tight power budgets of the portable market, Actel introduced the IGLOO FPGA. The IGLOO family of FPGAs was based on Actel's nonvolatile flash technology and the ProASIC 3 FPGA architecture. Two new IGLOO derivatives were added in 2008: IGLOO PLUS FPGAs with enhanced I/O capabilities, and IGLOO nano FPGAs, a low power solution at 2 µW. A nano version of ProASIC3 also became available in 2008. In 2010, Actel introduced the

SmartFusion SmartFusion is a family of microcontrollers with an integrated FPGA of Actel. The device includes an ARM Cortex-M3 hard processor core (with up to 512kB of flash and 64kB of RAM) and analog peripherals such as a multi-channel ADC and DACs in addit ...

line of FPGAs. SmartFusion includes both analog components and a programmable flash-based logic fabric within the same chip. SmartFusion was the first FPGA product to additionally include a hard ARM processor core.

Altera Altera Corporation was a manufacturer of programmable logic devices (PLDs) headquartered in San Jose, California. It was founded in 1983 and acquired by Intel in 2015. The main product lines from Altera were the flagship Stratix series, mid-rang ...

and

Xilinx Xilinx, Inc. ( ) was an American technology and semiconductor company that primarily supplied programmable logic devices. The company was known for inventing the first commercially viable field-programmable gate array (FPGA) and creating the fi ...

are the other key players in the market, however their main focus is on SRAM FPGAs.

Lattice Semiconductor Lattice Semiconductor Corporation is an American semiconductor company specializing in the design and manufacturing of low power, field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). Headquartered in the Silicon Forest area of Hillsboro, Oregon, the company ...

is another competitor.

Technologies

Actel's portfolio of FPGAs is based on two types of technologies: antifuse-based FPGAs (Axcelerator, SX-A, eX, and MX families) and flash-based FPGAs (Fusion, PolarFire, IGLOO, and ProASIC3 families). Actel's antifuse FPGAs have been known for their nonvolatility, live at power-up operation, single-chip form factor, and security. Actel's flash-based FPGA families include these same characteristics and are also reprogrammable and low power. Actel also develops system-critical FPGAs (RTAX and ProASIC3 families), including extended temperature automotive, military, and aerospace FPGAs, plus a wide variety of space-class radiation-tolerant devices. These flash and antifuse FPGAs have high levels of reliability and firm-error immunity.

Controversy

In March 2012, researchers from Cambridge University discovered that a backdoor exists in the JTAG interface of the ProASIC3 family of low-powered FPGAs. They defended their theory at a

cryptography Cryptography, or cryptology (from grc, , translit=kryptós "hidden, secret"; and ''graphein'', "to write", or ''-logia'', "study", respectively), is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of adver ...

workshop held in Belgium in September 2012.CHES 2012
Workshop on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems

References

External links

Corporate website
{{Authority control Defunct semiconductor companies of the United States Electronic design automation companies Fabless semiconductor companies Technology companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area Companies based in Mountain View, California American companies established in 1985 Electronics companies established in 1985 Electronics companies disestablished in 2010 1985 establishments in California 2010 disestablishments in California Companies formerly listed on the Nasdaq Defunct manufacturing companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area 2010 mergers and acquisitions