Hong Kong, December 13, 2012 — Altera (NASDAQ: ALTR) announced that it has begun sample shipment of its 28nm SoC devices that combine dual-core ARM® Cortex™-A9 processor system and FPGA logic in a single device. By incorporating multiple heterogeneous functional elements, Altera SoC enables developers in wireless communications, industrial, video surveillance, automotive, and medical equipment markets to design SoC solutions customized to their respective system power, board space, performance, and cost requirements. The first SoC device product for which Altera begins sample shipment is the low-power, low-cost Cyclone® V SoC. Altera will showcase these SoC products at the ARM Technology Symposium Europe being held this week.

Vince Hu, Vice President of Product and Marketing at Altera, stated: "The number of customers already designing with Altera SoC has exceeded our expectations. Embedded developers choose Altera SoC because these devices offer an irresistibly superior feature set. With silicon now available, customers who developed application software using our SoC Virtual Target can now rapidly port their application software to the SoC, saving several months of development time."

Altera is currently the only FPGA company supplying SoC that supports 32-bit ECC (error correction code) functionality for achieving data integrity in embedded systems. ECC functionality is essential for customers who must achieve high-performance, reliable systems. This SoC incorporates ECC functionality across numerous on-chip memory instances and peripheral interfaces including external DRAM memory interface, L2 cache, scratch RAM, Ethernet MAC, USB ports, and flash memory interface. Additionally, this device family includes, as unique features across all SoC products, a high-bandwidth memory controller with memory protection, flexible boot capability, and PCI Express® (PCIe®).

Avihay Lahman, Director of Research and Development at Gilat, stated: "The SoC offers an attractive solution for use in Altera's commercial satellite communication terminals. Altera's space and power-constrained systems can reduce the number of discrete components. Following thorough evaluation and testing, Altera's SoC has proven to offer the most comprehensive feature set enabling the design of highly reliable systems while optimizing performance and power."

Altera SoC benefits from a comprehensive ecosystem including operating systems, hardware design tools, and software development solutions from Altera, ARM, and third-party vendors, enabling convenient use of these devices and shortened development time. Furthermore, to strengthen tool ecosystem support, Altera and ARM have jointly developed the ARM Development Studio 5™ Altera® Edition toolkit with FPGA adaptive debugging capabilities, fully supporting Altera SoC devices. Detailed information on this toolkit is available at www.altera.com/ds-5-ae.

To enable early software development initiation, Altera released the SoC Virtual Target software design tool in October 2011. Using this design tool, customers could begin developing their application software prior to hardware availability. Many Altera customers are utilizing the SoC Virtual Target tool, and with the ability to now port this application software to SoC FPGA, they achieve savings of several months in development time.

Altera will showcase the Cyclone V SoC Development Kit at the ARM Technology Symposium Europe being held this week. This demonstration shows booting and running Linux on two CPUs using the Cyclone V SoC development board. At this technical symposium, attendees can directly discuss these SoC FPGAs with Altera staff and learn about the development tool ecosystem.

Availability
Altera has begun sample shipment of the Cyclone V SoC FPGA (5CSXA6) offering 110K logic elements (LE). Additional sample shipments are planned for Q1 2013, with mass production device shipments scheduled for the second half of next year.
For order information or pricing inquiries, please contact Altera's sales representative, Uniquest (031-776-9888)