Altera has announced its portfolio of 28-nm devices, unveiling clearly differentiated solutions across the new Cyclone V and Arria V FPGA families, as well as the recently expanded Stratix V FPGA and previously announced HardCopy V ASIC families.
With this 28-nm portfolio, Altera leverages its competencies in transceiver technology, product architecture, intellectual property (IP) integration, and process technology in the following ways:
- Transceivers—Altera's28-nm devices support transceiver speeds from 600 Mbps to 28 Gbps.
- Product architecture—On-chip memories are said to be optimized for performance and efficiency; hard and soft memory controllers support the necessary application bandwidth, power and cost requirements; and high-end, midrange and low-cost I/Os are optimized for performance.
- IP integration—Altera is hardening a range of system-level IP, such as PCI Express (PCIe) Gen2 x1 and x4, PCIe Gen3 x8, Interlaken, 40G/100G and 100 Gigabit Ethernet (100GbE).
- Process technology—To effectively serve the broadest range of applications, Altera is utilizing TSMC's 28-nm High Performance (28HP) process technology for its high-end product family (Stratix V FPGAs) and HardCopy V ASICs, and SMC's 28-nm Low-Power (28LP) process technology for use in its low-cost (Cyclone V FPGAs) and midrange (Arria V FPGAs) product families.
Targeting applications that require a balance of cost, low power and high performance, such as remote radio units, in-studio mixers and 10G/40G linecards, Altera is unveiling its Arria V FPGA family. Offering 40 percent lower total power versus previous generation devices, the Arria V FPGA family devices include transceivers operating at up to 10 Gbps, hard memory controllers supporting DDR3 external memory, and efficient systolic finite impulse response (FIR) filters with variable-precision DSP blocks.
Altera's Cyclone V FPGA family targets applications such as motor control, displays and software-defined radios, where low power and board space are concerns. The Cyclone V family is said to offer 40 percent lower total power versus the previous generation devices, 12 transceivers operating at up to 5 Gbps, hardened PCIe Gen2 x1 blocks, and hard memory controllers supporting LPDDR2, mobile DDR and DDR3 external memory.