Altera ships Cyclone V family

HONG KONG: Altera Corp. has started shipping its 28-nm Cyclone V FPGAs. The Cyclone V devices are the lowest power and lowest cost 28-nm FPGAs available on the market today. Integrating an unparalleled combination of high functionality with low system cost and low power, the family is ideally suited for applications in the industrial, wireless, wireline, military and automotive markets.

Shipping the Cyclone V family completes Altera’s release of its from Altera’s 28-nm tailored product portfolio which offers a broad range of devices - from the highest bandwidth to the lowest power—to meet customer’s specific design needs. The Cyclone V family is developed on TSMC’s 28-nm Low Power (28LP) process, delivering the lowest power, lowest cost, and optimal performance levels needed for today’s high-volume, cost-sensitive applications. The family delivers up to 40 percent lower total power and up to 30 percent lower static power than the previous generation.

Cyclone V FPGAs offer the lowest power serial transceivers with 88-mW power consumption per channel at 5 Gbps and over 4,000-MIPS processing performance for under 1.8 W. Additionally, the family integrates an abundance of hard intellectual property blocks, such as hard memory controllers supporting 400MHz DDR3 and PCI Express Gen2 hard IP blocks with multifunction support, to allow engineers to differentiate while reducing system costs, power and design time.

To protect valuable IP investments, the family also includes comprehensive design protection with features such as a 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) with volatile and non-volatile keys. “By completely shipping Altera tailored 28-nm product portfolio, our customers can take full advantage of the industry’s most diverse product offering to meet their unique system needs for performance, power and cost,” said Patrick Dorsey, director of product marketing at Altera. “As the technical challenges of greater integration, increased performance, lower power, and faster time to market become more complex, the Cyclone V family delivers the right solution for cost-sensitive, high-volume markets.”

For applications such as protocol bridging, motor control, broadcast and handheld devices, where low power and board space are concerns, Altera’s Cyclone V FPGA family is an ideal fit. The family encompasses six variants allowing designers to choose the device that best meets their needs—the logic-only E, the 3.125-Gbps transceiver GX, the 5-Gbps transceiver GT, and the SE, SX and ST SoC variants with integrated dual-core ARM-based Hard Processor System (HPS).

Software support is available now and engineering samples of Altera’s Cyclone V FPGAs are shipping today.