Microchip SmartFusion
SmartFusion is a family of microcontroller-class SoC FPGAs from Microchip Technology. The devices includes an ARM Cortex-M3 hard processor core in addition to their flash-based FPGA fabric.
SmartFusion devices
SmartFusion2 devices
Development hardware
Actel also sells two development boards that include an SmartFusion chip. One is the SmartFusion Evaluation Kit which is a low cost board with an SmartFusion A2F200 and sold for $99. Another is the SmartFusion Development Kit which is a fully featured board with an SmartFusion A2F500 and is sold for $999.Development tools
Documentation
The amount of documentation for all ARM chips is daunting, especially for newcomers. The documentation for microcontrollers from past decades would easily be inclusive in a single document, but as chips have evolved so has the documentation grown. The total documentation is especially hard to grasp for all ARM chips since it consists of documents from the IC manufacturer and documents from CPU core vendor.A typical top-down documentation tree is: manufacturer website, manufacturer marketing slides, manufacturer datasheet for the exact physical chip, manufacturer detailed reference manual that describes common peripherals and aspects of a physical chip family, ARM core generic user guide, ARM core technical reference manual, ARM architecture reference manual that describes the instruction set.
;SmartFusion documentation tree :
- SmartFusion website.
- SmartFusion marketing slides.
- SmartFusion datasheets.
- SmartFusion reference manuals.
- ARM core website.
- ARM core generic user guide.
- ARM core technical reference manual.
- ARM architecture reference manual.