ETAS GmbH
"The integration of a processor and logic into a single Excalibur device provided us the bandwidth improvement that we needed to implement more analog-to-digital channels than were previously possible, enabling us to increase the capability of our products. Furthermore, Altera's design software provided a powerful and easy-to-use design environment for Excalibur devices, significantly reducing our development time when compared to other embedded processor solutions."
Joachim Breithaupt
Engineering Manager
Philips Centre for Industrial Technology
"The Excalibur family provides the highest level of integration we could implement while maintaining the flexibility to keep pace with changes associated with embedded hardware/software co-designs. In our current AVALON project, a scalable PCI plug-in system and silicon prototyping solution, we use the Excalibur EPXA10 device with an APEX 20KE device to create an ideal platform for implementing large amounts of hardware IP. These IP cores are tightly integrated with the processor subsystem included in the Excalibur family of devices. Consequently, the resulting communications channel between software and hardware is an order of magnitude faster than existing systems, making real-time prototyping possible for many applications. The system is also scalable using multiple boards."
Hans Roeven
Senior System Architect
WaveIP Ltd.
"The presence of an embedded processor in Excalibur devices allows us to explore the full range of system partitioning options between tasks accomplished in software and programmable logic hardware, while providing pathways for future system enhancements. This flexible solution is essential to achieving the packet processing requirements necessary for each wireless deployment cell site to support video, voice and internet data communications."
Ami Ben-Hayun
Hardware Manager
Synplicity
"By integrating logic and memory with its ARM-based Excalibur embedded processor cores, Altera is enabling the programmable system-on-a-chip technology required for emerging communications and multimedia applications. Using synthesis solutions, such as our Synplify and Amplify Physical Optimizer products, designers can achieve the high performance and quality of results needed to take full advantage of these devices."
Jeff Garrison
Director of Product Marketing
LTX Corporation
"I would like to extend my appreciation to Altera Corporation and its team of engineers and workshop personnel for hosting a well-presented workshop on the Excalibur and Nios family of processors. It was very informative and well presented. In my 15 years of experience in the industry, this was the best workshop/new product introduction I have attended. You, Altera, went the whole nine yards. The only low point for me at the workshop was to realize that we would not be bringing back the Excalibur Development Kit to our company, LTX Corporation. Congratulations to the entire team for a job well done!"
Anthony Griffiths
System Test Engineer
ARM Limited
"The combination of ARM's industry-leading microprocessor core technology, the AMBA bus architecture, and Altera's programmable logic solutions will provide broad market access to all system level designers in need of meeting stringent time-to-market requirements."
Mike Muller
Executive Vice President
Alcatel Research & Innovation
"The integration of hard core processors with industry-leading programmable logic in Excalibur devices results in significant performance benefits for system designers. In our latest project, we used several ARM-based Excalibur devices to implement speed-intensive communications functions. Besides allowing us to achieve our speed goals, the Excalibur device's on-board peripherals and abundant memory helped us to reduce the overall device count and eliminated the need for IP that we had planned to purchase for the project and that would have used valuable programmable logic to implement."
Don Zriny
Manager
Systems Development Engineering
Alcatel Bell Space
"Besides allowing us to reach our required performance and reduce our component count, Excalibur PLDs offer several intelligent features. We are using the generous on-board dual-port memory to support efficient transfers between the processor and the programmable logic array. Also, we are taking advantage of the ability to boot the processor in stand-alone mode and have it take control of the configuration of the programmable logic array. This feature allows us to build dynamically reconfigurable systems within a single device."
Jo Van Langendonck
Project Manager
Alcatel CIT
"We performed a thorough evaluation of the design flow for Altera's Excalibur devices, and found the Quartus II design software to be an intuitive, powerful tool. Quartus II design software is well integrated with Mentor Graphics' co-verification environment, allowing us to easily debug the complex interaction between the processor and the programmable logic array. Altera has provided a mature development environment for creating PLD designs with embedded processors."
Dominique Deprey
Design Development Team Leader
