The devices' ability to be reconfigured allows the FPGAs to be updated in the lab or in the field with encrypted and authenticated bitstreams They also have the capability to be one-time programmable to provide higher assurance that overwriting the design by unauthorized entities is impossible. This is beneficial for designs where single function ASICs are traditionally used, but the design and development flow requires the ability to be reprogrammed through development.
The devices offer the following permanent lock bits. You can enable any of the following locks permanently:
The permanent locks cannot be unlocked by passcodes. All the permanent lock bits are located in the same segment. The permanent locks segment can be written only once and is immune to zeroization operations. Once one or more of the permanent lock bits are programmed then they cannot be changed and the entire segment becomes unchangeable.
The Configure Permanent Locks for Production (#GUID-AF1A7ACC-A4E8-4379-9AB1-702DDB035C4C__ID-00001043) in the Libero Flow allows to configure Permanent Locks for Production programming. Permanent Locks must be configured after the Design/Debug phase is completed. The Permanent Lock settings are not applied when the device programming is done using Program Design > Run PROGRAM Action. They are only applied to the Export tools used for Production programming. Once the Permanent Locks are programmed, they cannot be changed. Configuring the Permanent Locks affect the settings on the subsequent pages and should be reviewed carefully. The settings cannot be changed once they are programmed.