FPGA industry’s highest performance SoCs from Altera

26th September 2013

Altera Europe

Nat Bowers

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Altera announce production availability of the Cyclone V SoCs and engineering sample availability of its Arria V SoCs. With increased processor peak clock frequencies — Cyclone V SoCs at 925 MHz for commercial-grade and 700 MHz for automotive-grade, and Arria V SoCs at 1.05 GHz for industrial-grade — these devices are the industry’s highest performing SoCs in the FPGA industry.

Chris Balough, senior director of SoC product marketing at Altera, comments: “With production shipments beginning, customers will start accruing the SoC’s system benefits as they begin shipping to their own customers. Altera’s combination of leadership in SoC architecture, density, performance, and development tools, along with a processor roadmap to 14 nm, is a compelling value proposition for embedded system developers.”

Altera offers the industry’s broadest range of densities with its 28 nm SoCs, ranging from 25K logic elements up to 460K LE. This density range allows Altera SoCs to be integrated into a variety of embedded systems, ranging from cost-sensitive industrial automation and automotive driver assist systems to applications that require higher-performance, including remote radio units, 10G/40G line cards and broadcast studio equipment. Increasing the core frequency of the dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore processor enables the devices to meet performance requirements of an even greater number of embedded systems.

Altera SoCs combine a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor system with FPGA logic on a single device. Altera SoCs include several distinctive features (32-bit error correction code, a high-bandwidth memory controller with built in memory protection, flexible boot capability and integrated PCI Express across all SoCs) that enable developers in the wireless communications, industrial, video surveillance, automotive and medical equipment markets to create custom SoC variants optimized for system power, board space, performance and cost requirements.

Altera SoCs are supported by a broad ecosystem of operating systems, design tools, development kits, and software-development solutions from Altera, ARM and third parties that ease the development and use of the devices. The Altera SoC Embedded Design Suite allows embedded developers to jumpstart their firmware and application software development by offering a comprehensive tool suite that includes development tools, utility programs, run-time software and application examples. At the heart of the SoC EDS is the exclusive ARM Development Studio 5 Altera Edition Toolkit. This toolkit combines the ARM DS-5 advanced multicore debugging capabilities with FPGA-adaptivity for unprecedented full-chip debugging visibility and control.

Availability

Cyclone V SoCs are shipping today in production in 85K LE and 110K LE densities and are available with all three transceiver option variants (SE, SX and ST). Cyclone V SoCs offer a single- or dual-processor core option that operates at a core clock frequency of up to 925 MHz in a C6 speed grade.

An automotive-grade Cyclone V SoC operating with a core clock frequency of 700 MHz is also available. These devices are perfectly suited for high-temperature environments such as automotive driver assist, infotainment and e-vehicle.

The largest Arria V SoC with 460K LE is currently shipping engineering samples. The Arria V SoC features a dual-core processor which operates at a core clock frequency of up to 1.05 GHz in an I3 speed grade.