TOKYO — Altera Corp. (San Jose, Calif.) will demonstrate the beta version of Quartus, its next-generation design software, at the Design Automation Conference in San Francisco later this month.

Bob Beachler, director of development-tools marketing at Altera, is in Japan this week to "gather feedback" about Quartus and Altera's next-generation series of programmable-logic devices, Raphael. The Raphael series will take Altera's programmable logic into the millions-of-gates level, with embedded memory arrays, lookup tables and product term capabilities.

"Max+PlusII will take users through 250-k gates, and we'll be shipping that density this summer. For Raphael, we needed to develop new software, starting with a clean sheet. Max+PlusII first came out in 1991, before the Web and multiprocessing workstations," said Beachler.

Altera's key customers will get an early look at Quartus at DAC; the software should be ready for commercial use in the first half of 1999, when Raphael PLDs are also expected to hit the market.

Altera has an 11 percent equity stake in WaferTech Corp. (Camas, Wash.), the wafer fab jointly owned by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd., flash manufacturer ISSI Corp. (Santa Clara, Calif.) and Analog Devices Inc. (Andover, Mass.). Though details of Raphael's base technology have not been discussed, it is expected to start out on a 0.25-micron process and migrate to 0.18 micron at Altera's foundries.

Quartus will feature object-oriented database technology for storing the design information. It is optimized to run on workstations with two or more processors, and in distributed computing environments.

Revision control is set up for automatic global file management in work-group computing environments.

"The Web didn't exist when our last software generation was developed. With Quartus, if a problem happens in a design, engineers can create requirements and beam them back into the Altera application support group for assistance. A designer facing a bug can package up the design and send it to our people for help. For now, that is planned to be free," Beachler said.

Also, designers can search a solutions database, or get online help. Software patches can be downloaded, as well as support for new devices.

The software is being architected to include the third-party EDA tools available from companies such as Synplicity, FPGA Xpress, Synopsys, Exemplar and others.

With Quartus, designers will be able to recompile incremental portions of the design, which should cut compilation time down "from hours to minutes," according to Beachler.