The industry’s first 40-nm FPGAs and HardCopy® ASICs was today announced by Altera Corporation, enabling designers to achieve new levels of integration and innovation. Providing unprecedented densities, performance and low-power leadership, the Stratix® IV FPGAs and HardCopy IV ASICs, both come with transceivers options. Having up to 680K logic elements (LEs), the Stratix IV family is 2X bigger than Altera’s Stratix III family, currently the largest FPGAs on the market. Offering equivalent densities as the Stratix IV devices, the HardCopy IV ASIC family features up to 13.3 million gates. Altera® 40-nm devices meet the diverse high-end application needs in a large number of markets such as wireless and wireline communications, military, broadcast and ASIC prototyping.

Designers need to deliver solutions that provide higher data rates, higher interface bandwidths, and increased data processing all in a power-efficient manner, with the increasing demand for services such as video over Internet, high-speed wireless data and digital TV. Altera, to address these design challenges, is leveraging its innovations in transceivers, memory interfaces, low-power technology and FPGA core architecture to offer new capabilities with its 40-nm devices.

The Stratix IV FPGA family, manufactured on TSMC’s 40-nm process, is comprised of two variants, an enhanced variant rich with memory and digital signal processing (DSP) resources (Stratix IV E FPGAs) and an enhanced variant with transceivers (Stratix IV GX FPGAs). Providing designers with the industry’s highest available bandwidth, more than twice the bandwidth of any other FPGA, Stratix IV GX FPGAs offer up to 48 transceivers operating at up to 8.5 Gbps. Including, Serial RapidIO®, CPRI (including 6G CPRI), XAUI (including DDR XAUI), CEI 6G, Interlaken and Ethernet, Stratix IV GX FPGAs also feature hard intellectual property (IP) support for PCI Express (PCIe) Gen 1 and 2 and also supports a wide range of protocols.

The Stratix IV family members, to address the low-power demands of customers, feature Altera’s patented Programmable Power Technology. To maximize performance where needed while delivering the lowest power elsewhere in the design, This power-saving technology optimizes logic, DSP and memory blocks.