Lattice Automotive (LA-) Devices Complete Media Interface

Recently I was sent a design that shows the value of Lattice AEC-Q100 automotive qualified CPLDs.  This design was provided to Lattice by the system designer and is shown here with their permission.

The design is for an Automotive Network Gateway.  The system is a protocol converter that handles communication between the various automobile buses: MOST, FlexRay, Ethernet, CAN and LIN.  The bulk of the processing is performed in the Freescale PowerPC processor that has on-board network Media Access Controllers that directly interface with many of the external physical transceivers.  The one device that does not directly connect is the SMSC MOST to MediaLB transceiver.  The MediaLB interface is 3 or 5-wire interface that is a multi-drop bus which is similar in operation to I2C and I2S.

For this application, the designer found that some signal translation and manipulation was required between the SMSC device and the microprocessors.  After reviewing the available options, these functions were implemented in the Lattice Mach4064V.

This functionality could have been performed in discrete logic, but in addition to the MediaLB interface, the designer was able to incorporate other system functionality and glue logic required in the design into this one CPLD device.  The Mach4064V provides a fast, small footprint solution that is very inexpensive.  As Lattice is the only TS16949 certified CPLD supplier that offers a –40C to +125C ambient device that is fully AEC-Q100 qualified, this customer was able to easily meet their customer’s temperature requirements.

While Lattice offers automotive qualified crossover CPLDs in the LA-MachXO family and has high performance FPGA’s on the roadmap, we can’t forget the small CPLDs that can easily solve many of the logic problems that automotive designers encounter every day.