Introduction

Microchip's PolarFire FPGAs are the fifth-generation family of non-volatile FPGA devices, built on state-of-the-art 28 nm non-volatile process technology. PolarFire FPGAs deliver the lowest power at mid-range densities. PolarFire FPGAs lower the cost of mid-range FPGAs by integrating the industry’s lowest power FPGA fabric, lowest power 12.7 Gbps transceiver lane, built-in low power dual PCI Express Gen2 (EP/RP), and, on select data security (S) devices, an integrated low-power crypto co-processor.

Microchip's PolarFire SoC FPGAs are the fifth-generation family of non-volatile SoC FPGA devices, built on state-of-the-art 28 nm non-volatile process technology. The PolarFire SoC family offers industry's first RISC-V based SoC FPGAs capable of running Linux. It combines a powerful 64-bit 5x core RISC-V Microprocessor Subsystem (MSS), based on SiFive’s U54-MC family, with the PolarFire FPGA fabric in a single device.

This document describes the features and supported standards for each of these user I/O types, providing details about I/O banks and I/O naming conventions. User I/Os support multiple I/O standards while simultaneously providing the high bandwidth needed to maximize the internal logic capabilities of the device and achieve the required system-level performance. They are specifically designed for ease of use and rapid system integration.

PolarFire FPGA and PolarFire SoC FPGA devices have two types of user I/Os:

GPIO and HSIO are organized in I/O banks and each I/O bank has dedicated I/O supplies. The unused supplies are connected to ground to reduce noise leakage. In addition to GPIO and HSIO, a number of I/Os are associated with system controller, transceiver clocks, and data pads. These I/Os are powered up independently of other user I/O banks.

The following table summarizes the dedicated I/Os available in PolarFire and PolarFire SoC families.

Table 1. Dedicated I/Os
Dedicated I/Os PolarFire FPGA (MPF) PolarFire SoC FPGA (MPFS)
GPIO
HSIO
MSSIO
MSS-DDR
MSS-SGMII I/O