Now Shipping: The Industry's Most Advanced FPGAs

Date: 2/3/2009

Now Shipping: The Industry's Most Advanced FPGAs

Altera Corporation has announced silicon availability of the industry's first 40-nm FPGAs. The Stratix® IV offer the industry's largest density, highest performance, highest system bandwidth and lowest power among high-end FPGA solutions.

Welcomed as the enabling technology that will drive the evolution of next-generation markets, such as video over IP, 4G wireless and digital TV, Altera’s Stratix® IV FPGAs offer the industry's largest density, highest performance, highest system bandwidth and lowest power among high-end FPGA solutions.

The first device available is the EP4SGX230, offering 230K logic elements (LEs), 36 embedded transceivers operating up to 8.5 Gbps, 17 Mbits of RAM and 1,288 embedded multipliers.
Leveraging the 40-nm process node, the Stratix IV FPGA family is comprised of two variants, an enhanced (E) version and transceiver-based (GX) version. The Stratix IV family offers up to 680K logic elements, over twice the logic capacity of competing high-end FPGAs, as well as 35 percent faster performance than competing solutions. The devices also support DDR3 memory interface speeds of 1067 Mbps. Stratix IV GX FPGAs feature up to 48 transceivers operating up to 8.5 Gbps, enabling the development of next-generation, high-bandwidth communication infrastructure.

Featuring the industry's most advanced logic and routing architecture together with Altera’s Programmable Power Technology, the Stratix IV family is the industry's lowest power, high-end FPGA. Programmable Power Technology enables the designer to configure every programmable logic array block (LAB), digital signal processing (DSP) block and memory block for high speed or low power, depending on design requirements. For additional cost and power savings, Stratix IV FPGAs are easily converted to Altera's transceiver-based HardCopy® IV GX ASICs.

Broad Protocol Support
Stratix IV GX FPGAs incorporate up to four hard intellectual property (IP) cores for PCIe Gen1 and Gen2 (x1, x4 and x8), and also support a wide range of protocols including Serial RapidIO®, Gigabit Ethernet, XAUI, CPRI (including 6G CPRI), CEI 6G, GPON, SFI-5.1 and Interlaken. Stratix IV GX devices are the only FPGAs that meet the rigorous jitter specifications of protocols like PCIe Gen2 and CEI 6G (critical for Interlaken).

The Stratix IV GX EP4SGX230 is currently shipping, with other family variants scheduled to ship in 2009. For more information on Stratix IV FPGAs, visit www.altera.com/pr/stratix4.