Altera releases Stratix IV GX transceiver kit

This full-featured hardware development platform has an Altera Stratix IV GX field-programmable gate array (FPGA) with transceivers that operate up to 8.5Gbps, allowing engineers to prototype and test their high-speed interfaces quickly and easily.

Using this kit, customers can test drive Altera's 40nm Stratix IV GX FPGA under their specific design system requirements.

Signal integrity is a critical design requirement for bandwidth-intensive applications such as digital video and 4G wireless, according to the company.

The new kit is said to allow users to evaluate transceiver performance for jitter, protocol compliance and equalisation at up to 8.5Gbps through a simple graphical user interface (GUI).

The Stratix IV GX edition of the transceiver signal integrity development kit includes a Stratix IV GX signal integrity development board.

This features: an EP4SGX230KF40C3N or an EP4SGX230KF40C2N onboard FPGA; eight transceiver channels routed to SMA connectors; Flash memory for storing FPGA images; an embedded USB-Blaster for FPGA configuration and control; and power measurement circuitry.

The Stratix IV GX edition also includes an application GUI.

This allows users to change transceiver settings and data patterns.

It also displays bit error rates for each transceiver channel, as well as temperature and power-consumption information.

The Stratix IV GX edition transceiver signal integrity development kit is currently available and is priced at USD2,495 (GBP1,657) for the 4SGX230N/C3 kit and USD2,995 for the 4SGX230N/C2 kit.