Altera breaks semiconductor industry record for most transistors on an IC

USA: Altera Corp. announced it has set an industry milestone in semiconductor technology by delivering the most transistors ever packed onto an integrated circuit. Altera's 28-nm Stratix V FPGAs are the semiconductor industry's first devices to feature 3.9 billion transistors. This level of functionality delivers unparalleled performance to system designers.

"Altera surpassed the known record for transistors when it taped out Stratix V FPGAs at the end of 2010," said Bradley Howe, vice president of IC engineering at Altera.

"Maintaining the rapid pace set by Moore's Law has allowed programmable logic to remain at the forefront of driving innovations in semiconductor technology. Achieving milestones like this continue to propel FPGAs to new heights of capacity and performance while delivering significantly higher levels of integration."

Stratix V FPGAs are among the most sophisticated semiconductors shipping in the industry today. They are the only FPGAs to leverage TSMC's 28-nm high-performance (28HP) process for maximum performance and bandwidth. The 28HP process, combined with optimizations made in the FPGA design, enable Altera to dramatically increase the capabilities of its high-end device family.

Features such as 28-Gbps transceivers, variable precision DSP blocks and embedded HardCopy blocks enable Stratix V FPGAs to be leveraged in the highest performance, highest-bandwidth applications such as 100G optical transport network (OTN) multiplexing transponders, 100-GbE line cards and advanced military radar applications.

Samples of the first member of Altera's Stratix V FPGA family (Stratix V 5SGXA7) are shipping now.