Date: 13/07/2010

New FPGA variant from Altera with 6.375-Gbps transceivers and 1.25Gbps LVDS support

Altera has enhanced its Arria II GX FPGA variant with 6.375-Gbps transceivers and up to 1.25-Gbps LVDS support. Altera says that the 40-nm Arria II family provides the lowest power 6-Gbps transceiver solutions shipping today, featuring up to 50 percent lower static power over competitive devices.

Altera says that the new FPGA variant can solve various design challenges such as adjusting to the faster transceiver speeds of the modern FPGA applications and the power consumption challenges. Altera also says Arria II GX FPGAs feature up to sixteen 6.375-Gbps transceivers and faster I/Os than the previous generation of Arria II FPGAs. These devices are suggested for an array of applications in markets such as wireless, wireline, test, medical and storage.

Some of the features of the new Arria II GZ FPGAs are:
1. Has twenty-four 6.375-Gbps transceivers, up to 400-MHz DDR3 interfaces and up to 726 I/Os.
2. Processing capacity has been increased to include a PCIe Gen2 hard intellectual property (IP) block, 30% more multipliers and 25% more user logic than the original Arria II GX family according to Altera.
3. With protocol reference designs, aArria II GX Development Kit, 6G Edition and online design resource centers, designers can meet the challenges of high-speed serial transceiver design with Arria II GX and GZ FPGAs.
4. According to altera this FPGA provides signal integrity features that accelerate product development, while consuming less power than competing solutions and quickly resolving transceiver design challenges.
5. The Arria II GX and GZ families feature up to 350K logic elements (LEs) and up to 16.4 Mb of embedded memory.

"Since their introduction, our Arria II devices have enabled our customers to solve their performance and power challenges and bring truly unique products to market," said Luanne Schirrmeister, senior director of product marketing at Altera Corporation. "With these extensions to the Arria II family, we are boosting the number of applications that can benefit from the unrivaled capabilities of these devices."
For detailed information on these new devices, see http://www.altera.com/pr/arriaiigxgz.

Availability:

Arria II GX FPGAs are shipping now and are supported in the Quartus II design software version 10.0. Arria II GZ devices will be supported in the Quartus II design software version 10.1 when the device ships in the fourth quarter of this year.

For more information visit: www.altera.com