What's New at Altera
Altera Ships Millionth Cyclone FPGA to Terayon Communication Systems
Altera Corporation recently announced that it shipped its millionth Cyclone™ FPGA to Terayon Communications Systems, Inc. Introduced just 16 months ago, Cyclone devices have been shipped to over 2,000 customers such as Terayon, who are now taking full advantage of the inherent flexibility of FPGAs at ASIC prices.
Designed from the ground up for low cost, the Cyclone device family has achieved rapid acceptance from designers in cost-sensitive consumer, communications, industrial, computer peripheral, and automotive markets who can now leverage the full benefits of FPGA performance and flexibility in their designs. "Being the first truly low-cost FPGA in the industry, the Cyclone family is opening many doors for programmable logic," said David Greenfield, senior director of product marketing at Altera. "To date, it is the fastest ramping product in our history. In addition to its unprecedented cost, we attribute Cyclone's success to Altera's strategy of getting customers involved at the product-planning phase. Ultimately, our strategy has allowed us to deliver the right product to them at the right time. The Cyclone family continues to gain momentum as cost is a major driving factor in most system design."
A key factor in Altera's recent market success is Altera's ability to deliver next-generation FPGA architectures in production quantities shortly after product announcement. The company's long-standing partnership with TSMC has been a critical contributor to its ability to deliver new leading products, such as Cyclone FPGAs, to customers on time and in the quantities they require.
Altera's Stratix II Expands FPGA Market
Much has been said and written about the opportunities that lay ahead for FPGAs, as programmable logic technology rapidly adopts capabilities previously available only in ASICs and ASSPs. However, until Altera's launch of the Stratix™ II family—the industry's first adaptable FPGA architecture—no other FPGA vendor has taken a fresh architectural approach and opened the door to new classes of applications. Featuring a new and unique logic structure, Stratix II devices break through performance, density, and cost barriers that have historically driven designers of high-bandwidth systems to use riskier alternative technologies. When planning their next-generation systems, designers can now look at the Stratix II family as a viable alternative to more costly and less flexible ASICs, ASSPs, microprocessors, and digital signal processing (DSP) solutions that traditionally populate the rest of the printed circuit board (PCB).
Based on recent analyst surveys, FPGAs today address more than half of all ASIC designs by density and performance. With the launch of the Stratix II family—the biggest and fastest FPGAs in the market—that ratio will certainly increase. "It makes absolute sense to re-architect the base configurations of 90-nm-based FPGAs and utilize all the improved capabilities made possible by the smaller process geometry," said Rich Wawrzyniak, senior market analyst, ASIC and SOC, Semico Research Corp. "Semico believes that anytime the underlying fabric of a device is made more powerful, there are potential large impacts in the target markets. The new Stratix II architecture, combined with the 90-nm process, presents both significant performance and cost benefits long awaited by designers—especially ASIC designers—looking to cope with tight design cycle time and the need to reduce bill of materials cost."
The Stratix II device family employs an innovative logic structure that eliminates the historical trade-off between performance and efficiency inherent in 4-input look-up table (LUT) structures. The ALM, the first significant breakthrough in SRAM FPGA logic structure in nearly a decade, allows inputs to be shared among adjacent logic functions. Built on the 90-nm process technology, the Stratix II family delivers a 50 percent increase in performance, more than double the density, and a four times increase in DSP performance—all at half the cost of the first-generation Stratix family. An Altera representative indicated that customers have expressed the need for a radical improvement in performance, capacity, and cost in order to look beyond their traditional design platforms, and that combining the benefits of ASICs and ASSPs with the flexibility of FPGAs provides customers with the best of both worlds.
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