For Release: February 07, 2002
Altera Powers Echotek's High-Performance Wideband Digital Transmitter/Receiver
Altera's Mercury™ Devices Deliver Super-Charged Processing Power to the World's Highest Performance Transmitter and Receiver
San Jose, Calif., February 7, 2002 -- Altera Corporation (Nasdaq: ALTR) and Echotek Corporation announced today that Altera's Mercury™ devices power the world's highest performance digital wideband transmitter and receiver, Echotek's ECTR-114-B and ECDR-112-B. With greater than 100 MHz input and output bandwidths, the Echotek transmitter and receiver are unique in the industry, and are ideal for software-defined radio (SDR), signal intelligence, and beam forming applications supported by Altera's Mercury devices.
Echotek designed the ECDR-112-B receiver and ECTR-114-B transmitter to meet the need for a software-defined radio with completely secure transmissions. Ralph Kimball, president of Echotek said, "We wouldn't have been able to accomplish this project without Altera's Mercury devices. We needed 16-bit, 47-tap finite impulse response (FIR) filters running twice as fast as the fastest commercially available application-specific standard product (ASSP), and Mercury devices delivered."
SDR systems can provide communication between various forces and/or agencies in times of crisis or war, allowing groups such as rescue, police, military, and international organizations to communicate on a variety of hardware platforms. These systems have the ability to provide secure communication by sending and receiving signals throughout the available spectrum, allowing secure signals to be a hidden component within the spectrum.
"Altera's system-on-a-programmable-chip (SOPC) technology enables the SDR goal of a platform-neutral, multi-band, multi-protocol, configurable environment for commercial, government, and military applications," said Tim Colleran, Altera's vice president of product marketing. "Built for bandwidth, the Mercury device family supports the high-speed capabilities needed by Echotek's products and other mission-critical applications requiring reliability and maximum performance."
About Mercury Devices
Mercury devices provide up to 18 channels of 1.25 Gbps CDR transceiver support for a maximum CDR bandwidth of 45 Gbps, up to 14,400 logic elements, and up to 114,000 RAM bits, in compact FineLine BGA™ packages. The hardware-assisted multipliers within Mercury allow over 30-16 x 16 signed or unsigned multiplications with speeds in excess of 300 MHz. Their CDR transceivers enable support for high-speed serial backplane applications or for high data rate communication standards such as Gigabit Ethernet. For source-synchronous differential signaling, Mercury devices offer two solutions: True-LVDS for high-speed channels and dedicated serializer/deserializers, and Flexible-LVDS™ for a fully scalable, 100-channel flexible solution. Mercury devices also provide the ability to interface with advanced memories such as DDR SDRAMs, ZBT SRAMs, and QDR SRAMs. Finally, Mercury devices feature a flexible quad-port RAM mode in the enhanced embedded system blocks (ESBs) to enable complex memory-intensive functions. For more information about Mercury devices, go to:
http://www.altera.com/products/devices/mercury/mcy-index.html
About Altera
Altera Corporation (Nasdaq: ALTR) is the world's pioneer in system-on-a-programmable-chip (SOPC) solutions. Combining programmable logic technology with software tools, intellectual property, and technical services, Altera provides high-value programmable solutions to approximately 14,000 customers worldwide. More information is available at http://www.altera.com.
About Echotek
Echotek Corporation, established in 1987, designs and manufactures high performance, high speed data I/O products used in RADAR, digital radio, signal intelligence, beamforming, medical imaging, and other data acquisition applications.
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