08 May 2007
High speed lines
Altera looks to fill transceiver design gap. Graham Pitcher reports.
Responding to increasing demand for high speed serial interfaces, Altera has unveiled a range of transceiver based fpgas. The Arria GX family supports such data communications standards as PCI Express, gigabit Ethernet and Serial RapidIO.
According to the company, the family addresses the rapidly growing need for low cost fpgas with transceivers for communications, computer, storage and industrial applications.
The family features five devices, with density ranging from 21,580 to 90,220 logic elements (LEs). There is up to 4.5Mbit of embedded memory and up to 176 multipliers. The parts are being manufactured on TSMC’s 90nm process and Altera says all will be shipping by September.
Up to 12 full duplex transceiver channels are available, using the same technology as found in the Stratix II GX family. Flip chip packaging, meanwhile, improves signal integrity over wire bond packages.
Author
Graham Pitcher
Supporting Information
Websites
http://www.altera.com
Companies
Altera
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