Flash Advantages Reduced Cost of Ownership

Advantages to the designer extend beyond low unit cost, performance, and ease of use. Unlike SRAMbased FPGAs, flash-based ProASIC3E devices allow all functionality to be Instant On; no external boot PROM is required. On-board security mechanisms prevent access to all the programming information and enable secure remote updates of the FPGA logic. Designers can perform secure remote in-system reprogramming to support future design iterations and field upgrades with confidence that valuable intellectual property (IP) cannot be compromised or copied. Secure ISP can be performed using the industry-standard AES algorithm. The ProASIC3E family device architecture mitigates the need for ASIC migration at higher user volumes. This makes the ProASIC3E family a cost-effective ASIC replacement solution, especially for applications in the consumer, networking/ communications, computing, and avionics markets. 

Security

The nonvolatile, flash-based ProASIC3E devices do not require a boot PROM, so there is no vulnerable external bitstream that can be easily copied. ProASIC3E devices incorporate FlashLock, which provides a unique combination of reprogrammability and design security without external overhead, advantages that only an FPGA with nonvolatile flash programming can offer.