10 benefits of creating your own custom controller in a MAX® 10 FPGA

Occasional Contributor

10 months ago

The MAX® 10 FPGA is a single-chip universal solution. Just provide 3.3V, and you have a chip that can be almost anything you want it to be, even if you don’t know what you want when you ship it. With quality and reliability suitable for automotive usage and an estimated life cycle out to year 2040, this is one FPGA you can design with now and for the long term.

	Instant-On MAX 10 FPGAs have integrated flash for self-configuring instant-on to simplify the board design and save board space.
	Single Supply In addition to saving the expense and board area of extra regulators, the single-supply voltage operation makes this suitable for supervisory functions that need to be functional first before all the other system voltage rails have been enabled.
	Soft Processors Create your own custom controller based on a RISC-V SoC with our Nios® V processors and Platform Designer software.
	Extra Storage MAX 10 FPGAs are available with dual image support, allowing you to store a golden image for reliable updates. Alternatively, you can use the extra flash to store infrequent data logging or processor program code.
	Integrated Analog FPGAs are digital, but the real world is analog. The built-in analog-to-digital converter is great for monitoring power supplies or analog sensors.
	Frequency Flexibility Thanks to the integrated PLLs, you can use almost any reference frequency for the internal logic and drive those clocks out to other devices in your system.
	Number Crunching Digital filters, color-space converters, and AI accelerators for TinyML are just a few of the DSP functions you can implement with the included multipliers.
	Agile I/O Most microcontrollers only support single-ended signals at the same voltage level. MAX 10 FPGAs support a wide variety of single-ended and differential I/O standards with multiple banks to interface at different voltages without level shifters.
	Package Options MAX 10 FPGAs have a wide array of packages from tiny 3x3 mm2 chip-scale packages to BGAs with 500 I/O, and you can still get devices in Quad-Flat Pack (QFP) if you prefer a package with pins.
	Free Tools Best of all MAX 10 FPGAs work with the free Quartus® Prime Lite software. The Quartus FPGA software empowers developers with best-in-class design automation and seamless IP integration, including the Nios V RISC-V processor and tools.