Altera transitions 40-nm Arria II GX FPGAs to production

SAN JOSE, USA: Altera Corp. is shipping in volume production the first members of its 40-nm Arria II GX FPGA family.

The Arria II GX device family delivers customers a low-power, low-cost and high-performance FPGA solution specifically targeting 3-Gbps transceiver applications. Arria II GX FPGAs are currently leveraged in a wide variety of high-volume applications in the broadcast, military, wireless and wireline markets.

The Arria II GX FPGAs now shipping in production include the EP2AGX45 and the EP2AGX65, featuring 45K logic elements (LEs) and 65K LEs, respectively. The devices provide excellent system bandwidth and power efficiency for developers of cost- and power-sensitive applications including access equipment, remote radio head, HD video cameras and military security equipment.

The eight embedded transceivers offered in the EP2AGX45 and EP2AGX65 operate at data rates up to 3.75 Gbps. Arria II GX FPGAs support several key industry standard serial protocols such as PCI Express (PCIe), Gigabit Ethernet (GbE), CPRI, GPON, XAUI and triple-speed SDI.

Arria II GX FPGAs are the latest members of Altera's 40-nm FPGA portfolio to ship in production. With these additional devices and the Stratix IV FPGAs already in production, Altera offers the industry's broadest selection of 40-nm FPGAs in production today. Altera expects its entire family of Arria II GX FPGAs to be in full production by the end of the first quarter of 2010.

"Our 40-nm FPGA portfolio supports a wide range of performance, densities and price points that enable our customers to quickly bring their unique, high-performance applications to market," said Luanne Schirrmeister, senior director of component product marketing at Altera. "The production availability of Arria II GX FPGAs helps us uniquely target the growing number of cost-sensitive applications that require higher bandwidth and higher complexity devices."