An fpga for every need?
1 min read
Altera has filled in the details of its 28nm product portfolio, developed in response to changing market conditions, according to Paul Ekas, director of component product planning. "FPGAs have moved from being used in prototyping 10 years ago to being used in high volume production. Users have become more demanding about what they need for their applications. And there has been a change in drivers, including cost, performance and power consumption."
Ekas said this has meant a diversification in the product portfolio and the technology it's built from. System IP is becoming important and is implemented in hard logic. Examples include memory controllers, triple speed Ethernet, 100G Ethernet and Interlaken. "We're investing significant engineering resource on hard and soft IP," Ekas confirmed.
The portfolio targets four broad areas. Low cost/low power applications are served by the Cyclone V range, with up to 300,000 logic elements (LEs) and 5Gbit/s transceivers. Applications which need to balance power, performance and cost are suited to the Arria V range, said Ekas. These parts feature up to 500k LEs and 10Gbit/s transceivers, while supporting 533MHz DDR3 memory. High performance designs are catered for by Stratix V, manufactured on TSMC's 28HP process. With up to 1.1million LEs, the parts feature 14 and 28Gbit/s transceivers. Finally, those looking to move to an asic like platform can use HardCopy V.
Stratix V parts will begin to ship this quarter, while Arria V will ship in the second half of 2011. Cyclone V will be available in Q1 2012.
