Date: 21/04/2011

Altera sampling its 28nm FPGA packing 3.9 billion transistors

Altera said it is sampling the first member (Stratix V 5SGXA7) of its 28-nm Stratix V FPGAs which has 3.9 billion transistors.

Stratix V FPGAs are made using TSMC's 28-nm high-performance (28HP) process. Stratix V FPGA packs 28-Gbps transceivers, variable precision DSP blocks and embedded HardCopy blocks targeting processor hungry applications such as 100G optical transport network (OTN) multiplexing transponders, 100-GbE line cards and advanced military radar applications.

"Altera surpassed the known record for transistors when it taped out Stratix V FPGAs at the end of 2010," said Bradley Howe, vice president of IC engineering at Altera. "Maintaining the rapid pace set by Moore's Law has allowed programmable logic to remain at the forefront of driving innovations in semiconductor technology. Achieving milestones like this continue to propel FPGAs to new heights of capacity and performance while delivering significantly higher levels of integration."

For more info visit www.altera.com