Altera rolls out production shipments of low-cost, low-power Cyclone IV FPGAs

SAN JOSE, USA: Altera Corp. announced the production shipment of its Cyclone IV FPGAs. The company also announced the availability of the Cyclone IV GX-based Transceiver Starter Kit.

Altera's Cyclone IV FPGAs are designed for cost-sensitive, small form-factor applications in the wireless, wireline, broadcast, industrial and consumer markets. These devices have an unprecedented combination of low cost, 25 percent lower power compared to the previous generation of Cyclone products, and high functionality that addresses high-volume, low-cost serial protocol solution needs.

"By offering Cyclone IV GX FPGAs in production shipments up to six months earlier than competing products, our customers can realize the cost, power and unique board space benefits of these devices," said Luanne Schirrmeister, senior director of component marketing at Altera. "Also, the availability of our Starter Kit gives designers confidence knowing that Cyclone IV GX devices have proven to be interoperable with other PCI Express chip sets."

Customers can begin prototyping with the Cyclone IV GX Transceiver Starter Kit which features an EP4CGX15 FPGA with approximately 15K logic elements, 540 Kbits of RAM and two integrated 2.5-Gbps transceivers. Cyclone IV GX devices support mainstream serial protocols and offer designers a rich supply of logic, memory, and I/O capabilities.

This lowest cost transceiver starter kit priced at $395 includes all the hardware, software, design examples and documentation necessary to easily develop an FPGA design for cost-sensitive applications.

This kit also allows designers to measure the FPGA's low power consumption, test the signal quality of the FPGA transceivers, and develop and test PCI Express 1.0 endpoint designs by using Altera's PCI Express hard intellectual property (IP). In addition, the kit can be used with the Quartus II Web Edition design software where no license is required.

The smallest Cyclone IV devices, the EP4CE6 and the EP4CGX15, will start as low as $3 and $6 respectively for 250K unit quantities.