Actel said, the SmartFusion family of devices will enable embedded designers to optimize hardware-software tradeoffs "on the fly" without board-level changes. Providing the processor and necessary glue logic in one device offers performance, cost and footprint advantages, according to company executives.

SmartFusion evolved from Fusion, Actel's first mixed-signal FPGA, hit the market in 2005. Fusion devices can integrate soft processor cores, including 32-bit ARM-Cortex M1 cores. According to Fares Mubarak, senior vice president of marketing and engineering, Fusion was a great concept and has been a success, but Actel realized that in order to target a wider swath of applications it needed to put more muscle behind the processor by hardening it and providing a full complement of standard peripherals.