Date: 04/10/2012

Altera releases broad set of 28 nm FPGA Dev Kits

Altera Corporation has announced the availability of its Cyclone V GX FPGA development kit based on the 28 nm FPGA. Altera claims that it was the first company to offer customers 28 nm FPGA development kits and is currently the only company to offer production 28 nm FPGAs and 28 nm development kits across all families, offering customers the fastest path to get their Cyclone V, Arria V, and Stratix V based systems to market.

“More than ever before, software and hardware designers require immediate access to development platforms that accelerate the integration of programmable logic and hardened ASIC capabilities into a single, high-performance and low-power solution,” said Patrick Dorsey, senior director of component product marketing at Altera. “With delivery of 28 nm kits across all 28 nm families, customers have access to complete development environments, reference designs, and IP cores, allowing them to dramatically shorten design time and spend more time adding differentiating capabilities to their products."

Altera’s portfolio of 28 nm development kits dramatically increase designer productivity by providing the tools and resources necessary to get 28 nm FPGAs developed and integrated into systems. The 28 nm development kits consists of FPGA boards, hardware and cables, and development software that give access to a variety of IP cores, reference designs and documentation.

Low-power, low-cost Cyclone V FPGA development kit:
The Cyclone V GX FPGA 28 nm development kit is for low-cost designs and provides a simple approach to develop system-level designs targeted for use in high-volume applications, including industrial networking, surveillance cameras and automotive infotainment systems. The kit supports a variety of functions, including FPGA prototyping, FPGA power measurement and transceiver testing. The Cyclone V GX FPGA development kit also includes a PCIe reference design that lessens the development of PCIe-based systems.

Midrange Arria V FPGA development kits:
Arria V FPGAs are designed to balance cost and performance while delivering the lowest total power for broadcast, video and communications infrastructure equipment. Altera offers three Arria V FPGA kits:
1. The Arria V GX FPGA starter kit is a low-cost solution enabling designers to evaluate Arria V GX FPGA features including the PCIe hard IP and hard memory controllers.
2. The Arria V GX FPGA development kit is a feature-rich prototyping vehicle that consist all the hardware and software that developers of complex 10G/40G line cards, high definition (HD) video cameras and video conferencing equipment need to develop full 28 nm FPGA designs and test them in a system environment.
3. The Arria V FPGA RF development kit is a modular development kit that includes RF components from Texas Instruments and all the hardware and software needed for RF transmit, receive and digital pre-distortion feedback.

High-end Stratix V FPGA development kits:
Altera is currently shipping six Stratix V FPGA development kits that are optimized to facilitate the development of systems requiring the highest performance and bandwidth, such as optical transport networks and 100G designs. These high-end kits considerably shorten design times by enabling the development and testing of a variety of advanced system functions and capabilities.
A standard Stratix V GX FPGA development kit offers a complete environment to start developing FPGA designs immediately and permits for the quick evaluation of Stratix V GX FPGA’s basic features, including transceivers and PCIe Gen3 support.

For transceiver-rich designs, Altera presents the Transceiver Signal Integrity development kit, Stratix V GX edition and Stratix V GT edition, respectively, which gives a platform for electrical compliance testing and interoperability analysis while providing the ability to evaluate the FPGA’s advanced 10G Base KR transceivers and 28-Gbps transceivers in real-world environments.

Altera offers the 100G development kit, Stratix V GX edition, complete with a CFP connector that enables the evaluation of Interlaken technologies in both OTN as well as enterprise 10G/40G/100G Ethernet applications.

Designers of DSP-intensive systems can take advantage of the DSP development kit, Stratix V GS edition, which is optimized for high-performance, variable-precision DSP applications.
Altera’s recently announced Advanced System Development Kit offers advanced serial memory interfaces, maximum bandwidth through PCIe Gen3, and the power of dual 28 nm FPGAs enabling complete system development, ranging from CMAP systems, remote radio head, data intelligence or financial trading platforms.

For more information: www.altera.com/28nmdevkits

Source: Altera