PCI-SIG compliant development kit for Altera's Arria GX FPGAs

Altera Corporation has announced that its low-cost Arria GX FPGA Development Kit has passed PCI-SIG's compliance tests on its first submission. Altera Arria GX FPGAs, combined with Altera's PCI Express x4 MegaCore intellectual property (IP) function, are an integral part of the lowest-cost, PCI-SIG-compliant development kit in the industry.

The kit provides designers with an ideal platform for developing PCI Express (PCIe), Serial RapidIO (SRIO) and Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) solutions for communications, storage, computing, industrial, medical and consumer applications. Built on a PCIe form-factor card, the low-cost Arria GX FPGA Development Kit delivers a complete environment for developing and testing designs that implement high-speed serial interfaces in Arria GX FPGAs.

"In addition to passing the compliance tests on the first round, our strategy of using our robust and well-proven transceiver technology on low-cost Arria GX FPGAs delivered substantial performance margins," said David Greenfield, senior director of product marketing for high-density FPGAs at Altera. "These performance improvements enabled significant reduction in the kit's board layer counts to an unprecedented total of six layers, which directly reduces customers' system costs. Through these achievements, we've reinforced our commitment to providing customers with the lowest-risk, lowest-cost, FPGA-based system solutions for PCI Express x1 and x4, Serial RapidIO, and Gigabit Ethernet designs."

Arria GX FPGAs are optimized to support PCIe, GbE and SRIO standards up to 2.5 Gbps. These standards are rapidly emerging as mainstream protocols in a wide variety of markets and applications. Features of the Arria GX family include the proven Stratix II GX transceiver technology, flip-chip packages for superior signal integrity, software tools and verified IP cores. For more information about Arria GX devices, visit www.altera.com/arriagx.

Altera's feature-rich and flexible PCI Express MegaCore IP supports x1 and x4 endpoint applications. In addition to the Arria GX family of FPGAs, this PCI Express IP core can also be used with the Cyclone' series, Stratix series and HardCopy' series of devices. For more information on features, capabilities and device support for Altera's PCI Express solutions, visit www.altera.com/pciexpress.

Availability
Arria GX FPGAs are now shipping and available for ordering through Altera distributors worldwide. The Arria GX FPGA Development Kit is also available for ordering through Altera distributors, with a list price of $995.