Microchip SmartFusion

SmartFusion is a family of microcontroller-class SoC FPGAs from Microchip Technology. The devices includes an ARM Cortex-M3 hard processor core in addition to their flash-based FPGA fabric.^[1]

Model number	FPGA Fabric			Microcontroller Subsystem (MSS)
	System Gates	Tiles (D-Flip-Flops)	RAM Blocks (4,608 bits)	Flash (KB)	SRAM (KB)
A2F200	200,000	4,608	8	256	64
A2F500	500,000	11,520	24	512	64

Model number	FPGA Fabric		Microcontroller Subsystem (MSS)
	Logic Elements	Total RAM (Kb)	Flash (KB)	SRAM (KB)
M2S005	6,060	191	128	64
M2S010	12,084	400	256	64
M2S025	27,696	592	256	64
M2S050	56,340	1314	256	64
M2S060	56,520	1314	256	64
M2S090	86,316	2074	512	64
M2S150	146,124	4488	512	64

Actel also sells two development boards that include an SmartFusion chip. One is the SmartFusion Evaluation Kit which is a low cost board with an SmartFusion A2F200 and sold for $99.^[2] Another is the SmartFusion Development Kit which is a fully featured board with an SmartFusion A2F500 and is sold for $999.^[3]

The amount of documentation for all ARM chips is daunting, especially for newcomers. The documentation for microcontrollers from past decades would easily be inclusive in a single document, but as chips have evolved so has the documentation grown. The total documentation is especially hard to grasp for all ARM chips since it consists of documents from the IC manufacturer (Actel) and documents from CPU core vendor (ARM Holdings).

A typical top-down documentation tree is: manufacturer website, manufacturer marketing slides, manufacturer datasheet for the exact physical chip, manufacturer detailed reference manual that describes common peripherals and aspects of a physical chip family, ARM core generic user guide, ARM core technical reference manual, ARM architecture reference manual that describes the instruction set(s).

SmartFusion documentation tree (top to bottom)

1. SmartFusion website.
2. SmartFusion marketing slides.
3. SmartFusion datasheets.
4. SmartFusion reference manuals.
5. ARM core website.
6. ARM core generic user guide.
7. ARM core technical reference manual.
8. ARM architecture reference manual.

Actel has additional documents, such as: evaluation board user manuals, application notes, getting started guides, software library documents, errata, and more. See External Links section for links to official STM32 and ARM documents.

• ARM architecture, List of ARM microprocessor cores, ARM Cortex-M
• Microcontroller, List of common microcontrollers
• Embedded system, Single-board microcontroller
• FPGA

SmartFusion Official Documents

• Official website

ARM Official Documents

Other

• Running eCos on SmartFusion evaluation kit Archived 2014-02-22 at the Wayback Machine