Quartus II v10.0 development suite for FPGA design

Quartus II v10.0 is claimed to deliver 2X to 3X faster compile times than the nearest competitor for high-density designs.

This latest software release includes support for Altera's 28nm Stratix V FPGA family and offers productivity features that enable design teams to achieve faster timing closure and shorten time-to-market.

Quartus II software v10.0 supports Altera's recently announced Stratix V GX and Stratix V GS FPGAs.

Stratix V GX FPGAs target high-performance, high-bandwidth applications with integrated 12.5Gbps transceivers supporting backplane and optical modules.

Stratix V GS FPGAs target high-performance digital signal processing (DSP) applications with the industry's first variable-precision DSP block.

Quartus II software v10.0 includes enhancements to the software's advanced place and route algorithms, Timequest timing analyser and Powerplay power technology.

These enhancements are said to enable Stratix V FPGA customers to achieve industry-leading compile times, greater than 90 per cent logic utilisation, rapid timing closure and low total power consumption.

The Quartus II software v10.0 offers customers a transceiver toolkit that helps PCB designers efficiently verify transceiver signal integrity before or in parallel with application design development.

The software's transceiver toolkit enables users to maximise signal timing margins and eye openings by instantly fine-tuning transceiver parameters and viewing bit error ratio.

The Quartus II software is equipped with an easy-to-use GUI that gives high-speed designers access to all the transceiver settings including pre-emphasis, equalisation, VOD, EyeQ eye viewer and sampling position.

Altera's self-service licensing centre simplifies the software licensing process by enabling Quartus II Subscription Edition software users to set up and manage software and intellectual property (IP) licenses online.

Users can view, generate, modify and manage licenses 24/7.

The software's licensing mechanism provides customers with flexible fixed-license installations, portable floating-license usage, a simplified ordering experience and easy-to-read license files.

Quartus II v10.0 works with Quartus Integrated Synthesis for small design changes to deliver a compile time reduction averaging 50 per cent compared with a full compile, and better timing preservation with consistent results.

New 10Gb Ethernet MAC, 10G Base-R and Xaui Phy Megacores functions are available in the latest release.

DDR2 and DDR3 SDRAM Controller Megacores functions supporting Altmemphy and Uniphy are included in the Quartus II Subscription Edition software as part of the Altera Base Suite.

Expanded QXP file support enables design teams to facilitate design re-use by creating a custom component library with post-fit netlists support in addition to existing post-synthesis netlists support.

V10.0 is the first production release of Quartus II Web Edition software for Linux.

Quartus II software now supports Windows 7 and added SUSE Enterprise 11 support in addition to v10.0 support.