Altera delivers first high-performance 28-nm production FPGAs

HONG KONG: Altera Corp. announced delivery of the industry’s first high-performance 28-nm FPGAs in production. Stratix V FPGAs are the only FPGAs manufactured using TSMC’s 28HP process, delivering a one-speed grade advantage over competing solutions.

The performance benefits offered by Altera’s high-end FPGA combined with its leading-edge process technology and features advantage enables Stratix V FPGAs to displace ASIC and ASSPs and win over competitive FPGAs in a variety of markets. Eight Stratix V FPGA family members are in production.

Altera started shipping engineering samples of the industry’s first high-end 28-nm FPGAs in April 2011 and moved to production in less than a year – the industry’s fastest 28-nm FPGA production roll out. Altera also continues to be the only company to ship FPGAs featuring 28-Gbps transceivers.

Customers developing the highest performance systems, including the world’s top communications, broadcast, military, test and medical companies, have selected Altera’s high-end FPGA for use in their next-generation systems due to the device’s performance advantage and aggressive production schedule.

Companies like Huawei, a leading global information and communications technology (ICT) solutions provider, realize firsthand the performance advantage offered by Stratix V FPGAs and have selected Altera’s high-end product family for use in their latest 400G high-capacity OTN system.

Huawei will be demonstrating this Stratix V FPGA-based system in their booth at the Optical Fiber Communication Conference and Exhibition/National Fiber Optic Engineers Conference 2012 (OFC/NFOEC) in Los Angeles the week of March 5. By providing the industry’s first high-end 28-nm production FPGAs, Altera enables the evolution of communications infrastructure like 400G systems and other high-performance systems in a variety of markets.

“There is a constant push in the financial markets for the highest performance at the lowest latency. AdvancedIO’s products combined with Altera’s latest 28-nm FPGA technology provide the ideal solution,” said Mohammad Darwish, president and CEO at AdvancedIO Systems. “Leveraging Altera’s Stratix V FPGAs in our network cards enables us to deploy the most reliable, error-free and rugged products in the market. The scalable density offered by the Stratix V family opens new possibilities for more sophisticated financial services with FPGA technology.”

Altera offers the industry’s broadest, most complete 28-nm FPGA portfolio, which is tailored to meet customer’s system performance, system power and system cost requirements. In addition to Stratix V FPGAs, the 28-nm portfolio includes Altera’s low-power/low-cost Cyclone V and Cyclone V SoC FPGAs, its mid-range Arria V and Arria V SoC FPGAs and development kits.

The Stratix V FPGA family includes an E variant which is rich in logic resources and GX, GS and GT variants, which include integrated transceivers operating up to 28 Gbps. Stratix V FPGAs are the only FPGAs to feature variable-precision DSP blocks, high-performance floating-point DSP capability and are the only FPGA shipping today that feature hard PCI Express (PCIe) Gen3 x8 IP blocks and 28-Gbps transceivers.

“Production availability of our high-end 28-nm silicon comes at an exciting time, as companies are aggressively building higher performance systems or upgrading existing infrastructure to keep pace with their end customer’s demands,” said Vince Hu, VP of product and corporate marketing at Altera.

“Offering the first high-performance FPGA in production puts us in a great position to allow customers to differentiate and get to market quickly with their end system. The advantage we have with our tailored 28-nm portfolio is resulting in us solidly winning two out of every three 28-nm designs in the marketplace. We are also winning applications that were traditionally served by ASSPs and ASICs in optical networking, high-speed packet processing and other communications applications.”

Production units of 28-nm Stratix V FPGAs are shipping now and are supported in the latest release of the Quartus II 11.1 software. Engineering samples of 28-nm Arria V FPGAs are shipping now, and engineering samples of 28-nm Cyclone V FPGAs will be shipping this month.