Altera Presents a New Direction to the Industry Through Optical Innovation

Sharing a future vision through optical technology that eliminates chip-to-chip and chip-to-backplane bandwidth bottlenecks

Hong Kong, March 30, 2011 – Altera Corporation (NASDAQ: ALTR) today announced plans for optically interconnected programmable devices, presenting a vision that bandwidth can be matched with the creativity of application and content developers. Because transceivers are essential to these key industry developments, Altera is leveraging its leading technological capabilities in this field to realize its vision. These direct optical interfaces can significantly increase bandwidth performance for a wide range of applications while reducing overall system complexity, cost, and power.

If we rely on traditional copper-based interconnects to meet the ever-increasing bandwidth demands of applications such as HD (high-definition) video, cloud computing, and 3D gaming, progress will be delayed. Altera is leveraging its deep knowledge of system interconnect technologies to innovate against the inherent bandwidth and signal integrity limitations of copper technology by supporting direct optical interfaces in future device packages.

For computing and storage-intensive applications such as data centers, an integrated optical interface for the device package can replace connected optical devices, reducing power consumption by 70% to 80% while increasing port density and bandwidth by tens of times. For backplane applications used in fields such as military, telecommunications infrastructure, and broadcasting, these connectivity features comprehensively replace board materials and connectors, significantly increasing bandwidth while addressing signal integrity issues arising from the use of copper-wire-based solutions.