Actel FPGAs inside Boeing's 787 Dreamliner

Is Actel a low end FPGA vendor! Not really so. When this writer visited a FPGA design services company's booth at VLSI design conference held in Bangalore a couple of weeks ago, the company had displayed FPGA board solutions only for Xilinx and Altera. When asked why not for Actel and Lattice, The person in the booth said, we don't support low-end FPGA vendors.

Revenue wise Actel is smaller than Xilinx and Altera but by the application and technology wise Actel's devices seems to be very well present in high-end applications.

Actel has announced that its low-power ProASIC3 and ProASICPLUS FPGA families have been designed into flight-critical applications on the new Boeing 787 Dreamliner commercial airliner. Flight computers, cockpit displays, engine control and monitoring systems, braking systems, safety warning systems, cabin pressurization and air conditioning systems, and power control and distribution systems.

"Actel's history and proven track record of providing low-power, high-reliability FPGAs to the aviation market was leveraged by a number of design teams working on the safety-critical subsystems for the Boeing 787, resulting in many of our FPGAs being used in each aircraft," stated Ken O'Neill, director, military and aerospace product marketing at Actel. "We are proud to be part of this innovation, offering not only high-reliability digital logic for multiple systems on the new airliner, but also delivering the quality support demanded by Boeing and its subcontractors. Actel was the first FPGA supplier to achieve certification of its quality system to the aerospace industry AS9100 standard."