Date: 02/02/2009

New Stratix and Arria FPGA families from Altera with integrated transceiver

Altera released two new FPGA families with integrated transceivers. The new Stratix IV GT and Arria II GX 40-nm FPGA families offer transceiver speeds from 155 Mbps to 11.3 Gbps to address a range of applications, from video cameras to backhaul systems.

The Arria II GX, Stratix IV GT, and Stratix IV GX FPGAs and HardCopy IV GX ASICs utilize common transceiver technology and are supported by a common set of development tools that enable system designers to develop full system-on-chip (SoC) solutions. This portfolio delivers both FPGA solutions from 16K logic elements (LEs) to 530K LEs, and HardCopy ASIC solutions of up to 11.5 million ASIC gates.

The programmable fabric and integrated programmable transceivers provide designers with the flexibility needed to overcome unpredictable design requirements.

"Altera's expanded portfolio of transceiver FPGAs and HardCopy ASICs address the increasing market demand for a range of transceiver solutions. Since each application requires a unique set of features at specific performance, power, and price points, Altera developed this portfolio to provide optimal solutions to address a broad range of applications," said Danny Biran, senior vice president of product and corporate marketing at Altera Corporation. "These products offer superior signal integrity, the lowest jitter specifications, and broad high-speed I/O protocol compliance, alleviating the challenges facing designers of systems requiring transceivers."

The highest performing FPGAs available, Stratix IV GT devices are also the industry's first FPGAs to include integrated transceivers operating at 11.3 Gbps. The architecture is optimized specifically for 40G and 100G applications such as communications systems, high-end test equipment, and military communications systems. Stratix IV GT FPGAs have 24 transceivers operating at 11.3 Gbps, and an additional 24 transceivers operating at 6.5 Gbps, to deliver the industry's highest bandwidth available. The Stratix IV GT devices also offer up to 530K LEs, 20.3-Mbits internal RAM and 1,288 18 x 18 multipliers.

Arria II GX devices are the lowest power 3.75 Gbps transceiver FPGAs and are cost optimized for applications using mainstream protocols such as PCI Express (PCIe) and Gigabit Ethernet (GbE). They feature up to 16 3.75-Gbps transceivers, 256K LEs, and 8.5 Mbits of internal RAM. The Arria II GX FPGAs also support targeted protocols such as CPRI for LTE and WiMAX wireless infrastructure access equipment, GPON and XAUI for wireline infrastructure access and networking equipment, and triple-speed SDI for broadcast and other video processing equipment.

Availability: Now