Altera Launches New Cyclone IV FPGA Family
Addressing the demand for mass production, low-cost serial protocol solutions

November 3, 2009, Hong Kong – Altera Corporation (NASDAQ: ALTR) today announced the Cyclone IV FPGA family, which extends its leadership in transceiver technology with its successful Cyclone® FPGA series. Demand for mobile video, voice, and data access, as well as high-quality 3D images, is driving a growing need to provide wider bandwidth at a lower cost. To address this, the newly announced Cyclone IV FPGA family supports mainstream industry serial communication protocols while maintaining an optimal balance to provide sufficient amounts of logic, memory, and DSP capabilities while keeping costs and power consumption low.
The Cyclone IV FPGA family is available in two types. First, the Cyclone IV GX device boasts up to 150,000 logic elements (LEs), up to 6.5 Mb of RAM, and up to 360 multipliers. In addition, it features up to eight integrated transceivers with a maximum speed of 3.125 Gbps that support mainstream communication protocols such as Gigabit Ethernet (GbE), SDI, CPRI, and V-by-One. The Cyclone IV GX also features hardware IP for PCI Express (PCIe). Equipped with a small size of at least 11 mm x 11 mm and very low power consumption, these devices were created for price-sensitive and small-size applications in the wireless, wired, broadcast, industrial, and consumer markets. On the other hand, Cyclone IV E devices combine 25% reduced power consumption compared to previous generations of Cyclone products, a low price, and high functionality for power-sensitive applications such as software-implemented wireless communication.

Vince Hu, Vice President of Product and Corporate Marketing at Altera, stated, “The Cyclone IV FPGA will expand the applications of FPGAs in ways never before seen,” adding, “With pricing comparable to ASSPs and unrivaled flexibility, the Cyclone IV FPGA will be the natural choice for next-generation designs. The innovative specifications of the Cyclone IV FPGA family enable designers to easily create non-obsolete solutions that support multiple protocols, feature simple board designs, and last much longer than using ASSPs.”