Altera rolls high-bandwidth, 28-nm midrange FPGAs

The folks from Altera say that they've expanded their 28-nm portfolio with the introduction of the Arria V GZ variant, incorporating the company's industry-leading transceiver technology and delivering an overall core performance boost of more than two speed grades, or 30 percent.

This latest variant from Altera is designed to meet the demand for more bandwidth in communications and broadcast applications. Arria V GZ FPGAs feature 36 backplane-capable transceivers that can operate at speeds up to 12.5 Gbps and enable of a variety of protocols. In addition, the variant features four separate DDR3 DIMM interfaces at 72 bits wide, operating at 1600 Mbps. The combination of transceivers, fabric performance and quantity of available off-chip memory interfaces in Arria V GZ is unique for midrange FPGAs.

"Customers face many challenges when designing high-performance systems, including the need to balance power and performance while increasing bandwidth to off-chip memory," said Patrick Dorsey, senior director of component product marketing at Altera Corporation. "The Arria V GZ variant provides both the high-speed serial transceivers and the external memory capability that designers need to build today's bandwidth-hungry data processing systems."

Additional features of Arria V GZ devices include:

• First midrange FPGAs to feature hardened PCI Express Gen3 protocol stacks
• Soft intellectual property (IP)-based memory controllers allowing for maximum flexibility
• Most digital signal processing (DSP) in a midrange FPGA for high integration
• Industry-leading, anti-tamper features, including enhanced advanced encryption standard (AES) and easy-to-use on-board and off-board key programming

About Arria V FPGAs
Altera's 28 nm Arria V FPGAs consume 40 percent less power than the prior generation, and enable the industry's lowest power transceivers in midrange FPGAs. Arria V FPGAs deliver the lowest total power while providing optimized performance for midrange applications, such as remote radio units, Long-Term Evolution (LTE) wireless communication equipment, in-studio mixers, and 10G/40G line cards.

About Altera's 28 nm portfolio
Altera's 28 nm FPGA portfolio provides customers clearly differentiated solutions across the Cyclone V, Arria V, and Stratix V FPGA families and the HardCopy V ASIC family. For more information on Altera's 28 nm product portfolio, visit www.altera.com/28nmportfolio

Pricing and availability
Arria V GZ FPGAs are available now and are supported in Quartus II software v12.1. For more information, video content is available at www.altera.com/arriav. Additional information about Altera's 28nm product portfolio, including Arria V, Cyclone V and Stratix V FPGAs, can be found at www.altera.com/devices. For pricing information, readers should contact their local Altera sales representative.

---

If you found this article to be of interest, visit Programmable Logic Designline where – in addition to my Max's Cool Beans blogs – you will find the latest and greatest design, technology, product, and news articles with regard to programmable logic devices of every flavor and size (FPGAs, CPLDs, CSSPs, PSoCs...).

Also, you can obtain a highlights update delivered directly to your inbox by signing up for my weekly newsletter – just Click Here to request this newsletter using the Manage Newsletters tab (if you aren't already a member you'll be asked to register, but it's free and painless so don't let that stop you [grin]).