Altera ships Stratix IV E FPGA development kit featuring 530K logic element FPGA

SAN JOSE, USA: Altera Corp. today announced the availability of its latest development kit targeting Stratix IV FPGAs. The Stratix IV E FPGA Development Kit features the industry's highest density, highest performance FPGA available.

The kit provides users with a comprehensive design environment that includes the hardware and software needed to immediately begin prototyping their high-density designs.

The Stratix IV E FPGA Development Kit is based on a high-performance, high-density Stratix IV EP4SE530 FPGA. The FPGA features 530K logic elements (LEs) and provides on average 25 percent higher performance than currently available competitive FPGAs.

The performance and density advantage offered by the Stratix IV EP4SE530 FPGA enables customers using the Stratix IV E FPGA Development Kit to fit their large designs into a single device and achieve fast timing closure.

The Stratix IV E FPGA Development Kit is the first kit available to feature an FPGA interfacing with a 533-MHz DDR3 DIMM. Using this kit, customers can develop and test memory subsystems consisting of DDR3 DIMMs, QDR II+, and RLDRAM II memory interfaces.

The Stratix IV EP4SE530 FPGA is pin compatible with Stratix III FPGAs. This pin compatibility allows customers to seamlessly migrate their Stratix III FPGA design to a higher density Stratix IV E FPGA. Customers can also seamlessly convert their final Stratix IV E FPGA design to Altera's low-cost HardCopy IV E ASIC.

Upon silicon availability in 2010, customers will also be able to migrate their Stratix IV E FPGA design to a higher density EP4SE820 device, which Altera previously announced in September 2009.

The Stratix IV E FPGA Development Kit includes:
Development board featuring a Stratix IV E EP4SE530 FPGA
Board test system with design examples
2-GB DDR3 SDRAM DIMM with a 72-bit data bus
72-Mb QDR II+ SRAM device with a 18-bit data bus
576-Mb RLDRAM II CIO device with a 36-bit data bus
CD-ROM containing design examples
Nios II Design Suite license
Quartus II Design Software, Development Kit Edition (DKE)

The Altera Stratix IV E FPGA Development Kit is available today and is priced at $9,995.