As a user-customizable SoC FPGA, reducing board size, power, and cost in embedded systems, and improving system performance

Hong Kong, October 12, 2011 — Altera (NASDAQ: ALTR) announced an ARM-based SoC FPGA family that integrates a 28nm Cyclone® V or Arria® V FPGA fabric, a dual-core ARM® Cortex™-A9 MPCore™ processor, an ECC (error correcting code) protected memory controller, peripherals, and high-bandwidth interconnects on a single chip. These SoC FPGA products can leverage ARM's rich ecosystem, including software development tools, debuggers, operating systems, middleware, and applications.
Users can use Altera’s SoC FPGA development flow to quickly build custom ARM-based systems that improve performance while reducing board size, power, and cost of embedded systems for applications in various fields such as automotive, industrial, video surveillance, wireless infrastructure, computers, and storage.

Jim Nicholas, Vice President of Marketing for ARM’s Processor Division, said, “These SoC FPGA products based on 28nm process technology will enable the development of entirely new and exciting embedded systems with enhanced performance and capacity.
“These device products will not only enable embedded system designers to accelerate time-to-market, reduce costs, and improve energy efficiency, but also allow them to leverage the comprehensive support of the ARM software ecosystem,” he said.

Altera’s CycloneV and ArriaV SoC FPGAs feature a processor system comprising a dual-core 800MHz ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore processor, a NEON media processing engine, single-precision/double-precision floating-point units, L1 and L2 caches, an ECC-protected memory controller, ECC-protected scratchpad memory, and various other commonly used peripherals. This processor system provides peak performance of up to 4,000 DMIPS at less than 1.8 watts. The processor system and the FPGA fabric can be driven independently and configured and booted in any order. After starting operation, system power can be saved by lowering the power of the FPGA part as needed.

By interconnecting the ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore processor system and the FPGA with a high-throughput data path, peak bandwidth of over 125Gbps is achieved along with data consistency. This level of performance cannot be achieved with a two-chip solution. Furthermore, as an integrated single-chip SoC FPGA, board designers can eliminate external I/O paths between the processor and the FPGA, thereby significantly saving system power.

Altera's SoC FPGA products
These SoC FPGA products from Altera leverage Altera's 28nm product portfolio. By innovating in terms of process technology, transceiver technology, I/O resources, and hard IP, these FPGA products are designed to meet customers' power, performance, and cost requirements. By offering CycloneV and ArriaV SoC FPGA products, Altera has been able to further diversify its product portfolio for the embedded processing market.

These CycloneV and ArriaV SoC FPGA products are based on the low-power 28nm process (28LP). These products include embedded transceivers operating at up to 5Gbps and 10Gbps, respectively. The FPGA fabric includes variable-precision DSP blocks and up to three ECC-protected memory controllers.
Altera’s CycloneV SoC FPGA provides up to 110 KLE (logic elements), offers the lowest system cost and power in the industry, and delivers high performance suitable for differentiating next-generation industrial “drive on a chip,” advanced driver assistance, video surveillance, and other high-volume applications.
ArriaV SoC FPGA products strike a balance between price and performance for mid-range applications and have very low total power. These device products provide up to 460 KLE and are designed to meet the high performance requirements of applications such as remote wireless heads, LTE base stations, and multifunction printers.

SoC FPGA Development Environment
Altera's SoC FPGA enables hardware and software teams to maximize productivity by utilizing common tools and development flows that support Cortex-A9 MPCore processors and FPGAs.
Designers can use Altera’s Quartus® II software to create custom peripherals and hardware accelerators and integrate them with processor systems using Altera’s Qsys system integration tool. Hardware design work can be accelerated because the Qsys tool automatically generates logic for interconnects to connect intellectual property (IP) functions and subsystems.
Qsys automatically generates FPGA-optimized NoC (network-on-a-chip) interconnects, enabling superior performance, improved design reusability, and faster verification. Since Qsys supports industry-standard interfaces such as ARM’s Avalon® Memory-Mapped, Avalon Streaming, and AMBA® AXI™, users can utilize and reuse IP cores employing various interfaces within a single design. In addition, these SoC FPGA products are based on the standard ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore processor, so they can utilize the existing ARM software ecosystem.
Software for use in SoC FPGA-based systems can be rapidly developed using Altera's SoC FPGA Virtual Target. (Refer to Altera's related press release: “Altera’s SoC FPGA Virtual Target – Enables Rapid Software Development for SoC FPGAs”)

Vince Hu, Vice President of Product and Marketing at Altera, said, “Altera is setting a new standard for SoC technology by combining high-performance processing systems, low-power 28nm FPGA fabric, hardware-to-software development flows, and a Virtual Target development platform. As part of Altera’s overall embedded business, SoC FPGAs are achieving significant improvements for embedded developers in terms of system performance, power, cost, and board size.”

Price and supply
Embedded software developers can use the SoC FPGA Virtual Target to quickly get started writing specific device application software targeting Altera's SoC FPGAs. The SoC FPGA Virtual Target is currently available for purchase. SoC FPGA silicon is scheduled to be supplied starting in the second half of 2012, followed by the provision of reference designs and development boards. Prices for these Altera SoC FPGA products start at less than $15 for bulk orders.