Altera announces Arria II GX development kit

SAN JOSE, USA: Altera Corp. announced the availability of the Arria II GX FPGA Development Kit.

The kit features hardware and software resources that enable customers to rapidly evaluate and adopt Arria II GX devices, Altera's mid-range 40-nm FPGAs, for implementing a wide range of high-performance digital functions in communications, broadcast, computer and storage, test and measurement, medical and military applications.

The Arria II GX FPGA Development Kit reduces development time by providing a complete system of pre-verified components and supporting hardware reference designs. For example, the development kit offers an entire PCI Express (PCIe) Gen1 end-point design package, featuring a PCI-SIG-compliant Arria II GX FPGA-based development board with an embedded PCIe Gen1 hard intellectual property (IP) core.

A wide range of development resources are available on Altera website, including free PCIe training, PCIe, Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) and SDI-based reference designs to help designers get up-to-speed quickly, and a database of over 20 readily available mezzanine cards to address specific application and market needs.

"The Arria II GX Development Kit allows customers to rapidly evaluate Arria II GX FPGAs and quickly move their product designs from concept to reality," said Luanne Schirrmeister, senior director of component product marketing at Altera.

"This development kit offers a range of high-performance features that will enable Arria II GX customers to create custom hardware-based product differentiation in a broad range of applications."

The Arria II GX FPGA Development Kit comes complete with a development board featuring an Arria II GX (EP2AGX125EF35) FPGA with twelve transceivers, a one-year license for Quartus II Design Software, Development Kit Edition and access to Altera's MegaCore IP library including the Nios II Embedded Design Suite.

Arria II GX FPGAs provide customers with industry-leading innovations, including up to sixteen 3.75-Gbps transceivers, 256K logic elements (LEs) and 8.5 Mbits of internal RAM. Arria II GX devices are targeted for applications using mainstream transceiver protocols including PCIe, GbE, triple-speed SDI, CPRI, GPON, and XAUI.

The Arria II GX FPGA Development Kit is currently available and priced at $1,495.