Altera enhances capabilities of Arria II FPGAs
Altera
Arria II FPGAs
Altera has extended its Arria II range of FPGAs so that it covers a broad array of applications in markets such as wireless, wireline, test, medical and storage.
Altera has enhanced its Arria II GX FPGA variant with 6.375-Gbps transceivers and up to 1.25Gbps LVDS support, while broadening the range with the addition of the Arria II GZ FPGA variant.
As a result, the 40nm Arria II range provides low-power 6Gbps transceiver solutions featuring up to 50 per cent lower static power over competitive devices, according to Altera.
Many applications commonly implemented in FPGAs are moving to faster transceiver speeds, driven by the need to support mainstream protocol standards such as PCI Express (PCIe) Gen2, SATA III, CPRI-6G, Interlaken and RXAUI.
In addition, system power consumption is becoming an increasingly challenging design constraint.
The Arria II GX and GZ devices enable designers to solve both of these challenges.
Arria II GX FPGAs feature up to 16 6.375Gbps transceivers and faster I/Os than the previous generation of Arria II FPGAs.
With Arria II GZ devices, customers can achieve the power-reduction benefits of the Arria II range across applications with higher bandwidth requirements.
The Arria II GZ FPGAs feature up to 24 6.375Gbps transceivers, up to 400MHz DDR3 interfaces and up to 726 I/Os.
Its processing capacity has been increased to include a PCIe Gen2 hard intellectual property (IP) block, 30 per cent more multipliers and 25 per cent more user logic than the original Arria II GX range.
With protocol reference designs, a new Arria II GX development kit, 6G Edition and online design resource centres, designers are able to meet the challenges of high-speed serial transceiver design with Arria II GX and GZ FPGAs.
Altera's transceiver technology provides signal integrity features that can accelerate product development while consuming less power than competing solutions, according to Altera.
The Arria II GX and GZ feature up to 350K logic elements (LEs) and up to 16.4Mb of embedded memory.
Arria II GX FPGAs are shipping now and are supported in the Quartus II design software version 10.0.
Arria II GZ devices will be supported in the Quartus II design software version 10.1 when the device ships in the fourth quarter of this year.
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