FAR Systems Selects ProASIC Plus

FAR Systems, the European market leader in railway onboard communication systems and supplier of Train Communication Network (TCN) products for use in critical transportation applications, has used the ProASIC Plus APA450 as the basis of its MVBCF chip, the industry's most highly integrated MVB controller solution. According to Giulio Corradi, chief of research at FAR Systems: “Actel's ProASIC Plus FPGAs, provided all the features needed to satisfy the demanding requirements of railway communication systems that must comply with safety integrity levels. Satisfying key attributes of our systems -- reliability, availability, maintainability and safety -- Actel's devices are live at power-up, inherently immune to firm errors and offer the security of design. Actel's flash-based ProASIC Plus technology played a critical role in our success by allowing us to eliminate the external boot PROM, increase mean time before failure (MTBF) and reduce overall device count.” "The MVB developed by Far Systems reaffirms that flash FPGAs are being increasingly used as alternatives to SRAM FPGA parts and that manufacturers continue to profit from the inherent benefits of our programmable logic devices," said Hezi Saar, product marketing manager at Actel. "Far Systems leveraged Actel's workflow, tools and ProASIC Plus devices to create a true system-on-chip MVB controller."