Date: 17/10/2012

High bandwidth 28-nm midrange FPGA unveiled by Altera

Altera Corporation has expanded its 28 nm portfolio with the introduction of the Arria V GZ variant, integrating the company’s transceiver technology and delivering an overall core performance boost of more than two speed grades, or 30 percent. This latest variant from Altera is designed to address the demand for more bandwidth in communications and broadcast applications. Arria V GZ FPGAs feature 36 backplane-capable transceivers that can operate at speeds up to 12.5 Gbps and enable of a variety of protocols. In addition, the variant features four separate DDR3 DIMM interfaces at 72 bits wide, operating at 1600 Mbps. The combination of transceivers, fabric performance and quantity of available off-chip memory interfaces in Arria V GZ is unique for midrange FPGAs.

“Customers face many challenges when designing high-performance systems, including the need to balance power and performance while increasing bandwidth to off-chip memory,” said Patrick Dorsey, senior director of component product marketing at Altera Corporation. “The Arria V GZ variant provides both the high-speed serial transceivers and the external memory capability that designers need to build today’s bandwidth-hungry data processing systems.”

Other features of Arria V GZ devices include:
1. Hardened PCI Express Gen3 protocol stacks
2. Soft intellectual property (IP)-based memory controllers
3. Most digital signal processing (DSP) in a midrange FPGA
4. Anti-tamper features, including enhanced advanced encryption standard (AES) and off-board key programming

About Arria V FPGAs:
Altera's 28 nm Arria V FPGAs consume 40 percent less power than the prior generation. Arria V FPGAs offer low total power while providing optimized performance for midrange applications, such as remote radio units, Long-Term Evolution (LTE) wireless communication equipment, in-studio mixers, and 10G/40G line cards.

About the 28 nm portfolio:
Altera’s 28 nm FPGA portfolio offers customers clearly differentiated solutions across the Cyclone V, Arria V, and Stratix V FPGA families and the HardCopy V ASIC family.

Arria V GZ FPGAs are available now and are supported in Quartus II software v12.1.

For more information: www.altera.com/arriav

Source: Altera