Altera ships lowest power FPGAs with 6.375-Gbps transceivers

SAN JOSE, USA: Altera Corp. announced that it has enhanced its Arria II GX FPGA variant with 6.375-Gbps transceivers and up to 1.25-Gbps LVDS support, while broadening the reach of the family with the addition of the new Arria II GZ FPGA variant.

As a result, the 40-nm Arria II family provides the lowest power 6-Gbps transceiver solutions shipping today, featuring up to 50 percent lower static power over competitive devices.

Many applications commonly implemented in FPGAs are moving to faster transceiver speeds, driven by the need to support mainstream protocol standards such as PCI Express (PCIe) Gen2, SATA III, CPRI-6G, Interlaken and RXAUI. In addition, system power consumption is becoming an increasingly challenging design constraint. The new Arria II GX and GZ devices enable designers to solve both challenges.

Arria II GX FPGAs feature up to sixteen 6.375-Gbps transceivers and faster I/Os than the previous generation of Arria II FPGAs, making them ideal for a broad array of applications in markets such as wireless, wireline, test, medical and storage.

With Arria II GZ devices, customers can achieve the power-reduction benefits of the Arria II family across applications with significantly higher bandwidth requirements. The new Arria II GZ FPGAs feature up to twenty-four 6.375-Gbps transceivers, up to 400-MHz DDR3 interfaces and up to 726 I/Os. Furthermore, its processing capacity has been increased to include a PCIe Gen2 hard intellectual property (IP) block, 30 percent more multipliers and 25 percent more user logic than the original Arria II GX family.

“Since their introduction, our Arria II devices have enabled our customers to solve their performance and power challenges and bring truly unique products to market,” said Luanne Schirrmeister, senior director of product marketing at Altera Corporation. “With these extensions to the Arria II family, we are boosting the number of applications that can benefit from the unrivaled capabilities of these devices.”

With protocol reference designs, a new Arria II GX Development Kit, 6G Edition and easily-accessible online design resource centers, designers can easily meet the challenges of high-speed serial transceiver design with Arria II GX and GZ FPGAs.

Altera's transceiver technology provides easy-to-use signal integrity features that accelerate product development, while consuming less power than competing solutions and quickly resolving transceiver design challenges. The Arria II GX and GZ families feature up to 350K logic elements (LEs) and up to 16.4 Mb of embedded memory.

Arria II GX FPGAs are shipping now and are supported in the Quartus II design software version 10.0. Arria II GZ devices will be supported in the Quartus II design software version 10.1 when the device ships in the fourth quarter of this year.