Altera Cyclone V GT FPGA industry's first low-power FPGA to achieve compliance for PCIe Gen2 at 5 Gbps

USA:  Altera Corp. has announced its 28 nm Cyclone V GT FPGA completed compliance testing with the PCI Express (PCIe) 2.0 specification.

Available in production today, the Cyclone V GT FPGA is the industry's first low-cost, low-power FPGA to achieve PCIe 2.0 interoperability with data rates of 5 Gbps.

The Cyclone V GT FPGA successfully passed all PCI-SIG® compliance and interoperability tests at the most recent PCI-SIG workshop and is currently included on the PCI-SIG Integrators List. Cyclone V GT FPGAs provide developers a significant reduction in system costs and system power when developing PCIe Gen2-based applications compared to previously available FPGAs.

Cyclone V FPGAs feature integrated transceivers with data rates up to 5 Gbps and have two hardened PCIe IP blocks embedded within the device. The PCIe hard IP blocks enable developers to increase system performance and system functionality while boosting design team productivity. The PCIe 2.0-compliant hard IP blocks consists of the PHY/MAC, data link and transaction layers. The blocks can be configured to function as an end point or a root port and supports up to x4 lanes.

Cyclone V FPGAs and Cyclone V SoCs have an innovative multifunction support feature that allows up to eight PCIe end points to be combined into a single end point while still being supported by standard device drivers. This convenient feature benefits applications such as I/O expansion by reducing software driver development time.

The Cyclone V FPGA and Cyclone V SoC are also equipped with Altera's innovative Configuration via Protocol using PCIe, which allows the hard PCIe core in the devices to operate without the FPGA fabric being loaded. This ensures the PCIe end point is ready for enumeration under the PCIe protocol's required 100ms specification regardless of the configuration method being used.

Altera offers a full spectrum of PCI-SIG-compliant solutions across its entire product portfolio that are optimized to meet key application requirements. These solutions include configurable PCIe intellectual property (IP) cores and development boards for endpoint, bridge, switch and root port functionalities.

Altera's latest Cyclone V GT FPGA Development Kit enables simple and fast PCIe Gen2 protocol implementation while reducing design risk and shortening development times. The development kit provides a quick and simple approach to develop low-cost and low-power FPGA system-level designs to achieve rapid results.