Altera delivers industry's first serial RapidIO 2.1 IP solution

SAN JOSE, USA: Altera Corp. announced the immediate availability of the industry's first intellectual property (IP) core supporting the RapidIO 2.1 specification.

Altera's Serial RapidIO IP core supports up to four lanes at 5.0 GBaud per lane, addressing the increased bandwidth and reliability needs of the wireless and military markets. The IP core is optimized for Stratix IV FPGAs with embedded transceivers and is supported within Quartus II software v9.1.

The RapidIO 2.1 specification enables increased performance up to 20 GBaud in applications ranging from next-generation wireless basestations, high-performance military systems and DSP farms.

Support for the RapidIO 2.1 specification builds upon Altera's complete Serial RapidIO solution, which includes an end-point IP core that is backward compatible to the RapidIO 1.3 specification, reference designs, application notes, testbenches, and interoperability reports with leading digital signal processor and switch vendors.

The Serial RapidIO IP core has been qualified against the RapidIO Trade Association's bus functional model and is supported within Altera's 40-nm Stratix IV GX and Stratix IV GT FPGAs and HardCopy IV GX ASICs.

"Serial RapidIO is a popular interface for many of our wireless and military customers who put the utmost importance on system bandwidth and reliability," said Luanne Schirrmeister, senior director of component product marketing at Altera.

"Combining the industry's first Serial RapidIO IP core supporting the 2.1 specification with Altera's industry-leading FPGA and transceiver technology solidly positions us to address our customer's most important system requirements, including performance, reliability and scalability."

The Serial RapidIO IP solution is part of Altera's MegaCore IP library and is available now for evaluation upon download and installation of Quartus II software v9.1.