Altera's shipping its first SoC FPGAs

The folks at Altera have announced the first shipments of their 28nm SoC FPGA devices, which combine a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor system with programmable FPGA fabric on a single device.

These SoC FPGAs include several distinctive features that enable developers in the wireless communications, industrial, video surveillance, automotive, and medical equipment markets to create custom SoC variants optimized for system power, board space, performance, and cost requirements.

The first devices Altera is shipping are low-power, low-cost Cyclone V SoCs. Altera is demonstrating these SoC FPGAs at the ARM Technology Symposium Europe.


“The number of customers who have already committed to using Altera SoCs has exceeded our expectations,” said Vince Hu, vice president of product and corporate marketing at Altera. “Embedded developers selected Atlera SoCs because of the undeniable feature-set advantage the device family delivers. With silicon now available, customers who used our SoC Virtual Target to develop their application software can now quickly port their application software into the SoC, saving months of development time.”

The folks at Altera say that they are the only FPGA vendor today shipping SoCs that offer 32-bit error correction code (ECC) support, which helps ensure data integrity throughout the embedded system. ECC support is a requirement for customers who must have high performance and reliable systems. ECC functionality is built into the SoC’s external DRAM memory interface and an extensive number on-chip memory instances and peripheral interfaces, including L2 Cache, scratch RAM, Ethernet MACs, USB ports and flash memory interfaces. Other unique features in the device family include a high-bandwidth memory controller with built-in memory protection, flexible boot capability and integrated PCI Express (PCIe) across all SoC devices.

Altera’s SoCs are supported by a broad ecosystem of operating systems, hardware design tools and software-development solutions from Altera, ARM, and third parties that ease the development and use of the devices. Strengthening its tools ecosystem support, Altera and ARM have announced that they have jointly developed the ARM Development Studio 5 Altera Edition toolkit with FPGA-adaptive debugging that exclusively supports Altera SoC devices.

To enable early software development, Altera released the SoC Virtual Target software design tool in October 2011, which allowed customers to start developing their application software prior to hardware availability. Many of Altera’s customers have leveraged the SoC Virtual Target tool and are now able to port their application software to the SoC FPGA, saving months of development time.

Altera will demonstrate its Cyclone V SoC Development Kit at the ARM Technology Symposium Europe. The demonstration includes a Cyclone V SoC development board booting and running Linux on two CPUs. Altera representatives will be one hand to discuss the SoC FPGAs and to highlight its development tools ecosystem.

Availability
Altera is currently shipping initial samples of the Cyclone V SoC FPGA (5CSXA6), which features 110K logic elements (LEs). Broader sample availability will be in the first quarter of 2013, followed by production device availability later in the year. For ordering information, or for questions on pricing, contact your local Altera sales representative.

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