Altera Announces Stratix GX Design-in Kit for Cadence Allegro Platform

San Jose, Calif., March 15, 2004─Altera Corporation (NASDAQ: ALTR) today announced the availability of a silicon design-in kit for Cadence Allegro® platform customers building powerful multi-gigabit serial transceiver designs with Altera’s Stratix™ GX devices.  The design-in kit includes the first fully functional behavioral multi-gigabit serializer/deserializer (SERDES) device modeling language (DML) model for Cadence Allegro PCB SI.  This new design-in kit enables designers to shorten their design cycle and efficiently create a complete board design with Stratix GX devices in the Cadence Allegro design environment.

“Due to the challenges of implementing multi-gigabit serial links, we worked closely with Altera as they developed the Stratix GX design-in kit for the Allegro platform to help engineers accelerate the development of their high-speed designs,” said Brad Griffin, product marketing director, silicon design-in, Silicon-Package-Board Division, Cadence Design Systems, Inc.  “Designers using Stratix GX devices will now have all the necessary tools to design, simulate, and implement multi-gigabit data channels that are free of board-level signal quality issues.”

The Stratix GX design-in kit for the Allegro platform contains validated models, topology files, layout constraints, PCB reference files, footprints, tutorials, documentation, scripts, and other utilities, giving customers everything they need to quickly and easily bring their designs to market.

“By delivering the first fully behavioral SERDES model, Altera^® customers implementing Stratix GX devices are able to proactively address link simulation issues typical of 3.125-Gbps transceiver designs,” said Vipul Badoni, senior manager, high-speed I/O applications engineering at Altera.  “In Allegro PCB SI, our behavioral DML model performs at least 20 times faster than traditional transistor-level models without sacrificing accuracy.”

Availability

The Stratix GX design-in kit for the Allegro platform is now available.  Customers should contact their Altera sales representative.

About Stratix GX Devices

The Stratix GX family is Altera’s second-generation embedded transceiver family based on a 0.13-micron process technology with 1.5-V core voltage.  Stratix GX devices have up to 20 embedded 3.125-Gbps transceivers and up to 45 differential I/O pins with dedicated DPA capability supporting up to 1-Gbps source-synchronous data transfers.  For more information about the Stratix GX device family, visit www.altera.com/stratixgx.

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 www.altera.com.

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