Altera's Enhanced COTS Initiative Overview
Reduce Risk, Provide Reliable Systems, and Meet Commitments
The military's commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) initiative is based on the premise that military programs would benefit from new technology and economies of scale if they could adapt to commercially available components, boards, and systems.
While the COTS approach has been somewhat successful, there is still room for improvement. Commercial vendors must do a better job of meeting the challenging needs of the military and aerospace markets.
Altera's enhanced COTS initiative for FPGAs helps to meet these needs by ensuring that military contractors are able to reduce risk, provide highly reliable systems, and achieve expected commitments.
Altera's enhanced COTS solution features a multi-pronged approach, including:
Anti-Tampering Design Security
Anti-tampering concerns such as the protection of military intellectual property (IP) are critical to design security, especially for military systems. Altera’s design security feature in Stratix® III and Stratix IV FPGAs offers a 256-bit advanced encryption standard (AES) algorithm (FIPS-197 certified), and non-volatile key storage that can be used to encrypt military IP that is programmed into the FPGA.
End-of-Life Protection
Understanding the sensitivity of long-life requirements for military programs, Altera is committed to ensuring adequate product supply. Because Altera® FPGAs are used in a variety of markets, devices are kept in production longer, reducing customers’ obsolescence risk management volume.
When parts move toward end-of-life, Altera generates an industry-standard notification (JEDEC standard) with dates for customers to plan their last-time buy. For a list of current notifications, see the Altera Product Discontinuance Notifications page.
Military Temperature Support
Enhanced COTS expands the industrial-grade temperature range of the Stratix series of devices to military temperature requirements (from -40°C down to -55°C at the low end, and from 100°C to 125°C at the high end). This range extension ensures full operation across military temperatures without the typical cost premiums, limited device offerings, and poor end-of-life associated with military-grade products. To learn more about military temperature support, refer to Military Temperature Range Qualified Devices.
Quality and Reliability Levels for Rugged Environments
Military products are used in rugged environments all over the world, from the humidity of the tropics to the heat of the desert or the dry, frigid temperatures of the arctic. Altera provides quality and reliability levels that can meet these demanding applications.
Die Business Support
Altera continuously provides support for raw-die procurement for military applications that require multi-chip module integration (space, weight, and power savings). Altera also partners with on-shore packaging houses (such as White Electronics) to support the die business.
Product Change Notifications
Altera understands that the smallest modification to a component in a system can have wide-ranging and, at times, adverse effects. Communicating product change notifications proactively and in a timely manner allows military contractors to avoid unnecessary reliability and supply issues. Altera provides product change notifications to military customers as a standard operating procedure.
To view a list of the current notifications, see Altera's Process Change Notifications page.
State-of-the-Art Fabrication and Packaging
Altera has world-class partners (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and Amkor) to provide the best device fabrication and packaging. Additionally, silicon and packaging are designed concurrently to ensure reliable compatibility.
Featuring extensive package options, Altera devices meet the various needs of military and aerospace FPGA customers—including lead-solder packaging on all families, high tolerance to humidity, shock, vibration, and micro BGAs for small form factor requirements.
Lead Packaging
Restriction of hazardous substances (RoHS) is becoming increasingly important in civilian markets. However, long-term reliability data for RoHS-compliant packages in the extreme environments encountered in military applications is still being gathered. Therefore, to meet the extreme reliability requirements for military and aerospace applications, Altera continues to offer lead packages as well as RoHS-compliant packages.
Reliable Supply Chain
To meet the stringent delivery expectations of military systems, it's important that component suppliers adopt a supply chain process that is robust and reliable. Altera strategically partners with its suppliers to ensure customer satisfaction. From wafer manufacturing (TSMC), packaging and test (Amkor and others), through sales and distribution (Arrow and others), Altera provides a robust and reliable supply chain.
AQEC Compliance
Altera is part of the Aerospace Qualified Electronics Components (AQEC) working group and is GEIA-STD-0002-01 standard certified.
SEU Detection and Mitigation
As process geometries shrink, and the number of bits of RAM on FPGAs increases, susceptibility to radiation effects such as single event upset (SEU) play a greater role. In some military applications (such as control for avionics), steps must be taken to ensure uninterrupted operation.
Altera introduced the industry’s first automatic cyclic redundancy code checker for the configuration of RAM in an FPGA to continually and automatically check for changes in configuration that might occur from an SEU event. For more information on SEU, see the Single Event Upset page.
ITAR-Compliant HardCopy ASICs
Altera HardCopy ASICs provide an option for our U.S. customers to implement designs into an ASIC using an International Traffic in Arms Regulation (ITAR) flow.
Altera offers the only high-performance structured ASIC with ITAR compliance. Engineering teams design with Altera’s low-cost, high-performance Quartus® II software, and prototype and verify their designs with Stratix IV FPGAs. When the team completes testing, they archive the design, encrypt it, and send it to Altera’s secure ITAR Design Center server, where only U.S. personnel review the FPGA design and map it into a HardCopy ASIC.
Customers get the lowest risk path to generating a tamper-proof ASIC along with the ease of an FPGA front-end design flow.
ITAR Technical Support
Many military applications contain sensitive information and documentation handling requirements. The transfer of defense-related material, services, and technical information is controlled under ITAR. Altera has implemented an ITAR-secure process to facilitate the development and design of its FPGAs, CPLDs, and HardCopy ASICs. Application Engineers and Technical Services personnel, who are U.S. citizens, have been trained and approved to provide ITAR support. A secure work environment and special server has been set up to receive and store encrypted customer design files enabling direct communication and ITAR design support with the customer.
Military Products From Altera
Military transformational and modernization programs require the latest FPGA technology to be successful. With vast logic resources, large blocks of memory, and hundreds of digital signal processing (DSP) blocks, the resources for even the most demanding military applications are available on Altera's high-performance, high-density, secure Stratix IV FPGAs, as well as the low-cost, low-power Cyclone® III FPGAs. Altera also offers a low-risk migration to HardCopy ASICs, which provide instant-on, lower-cost, lower-power, and improved SEU tolerance requirements over the original FPGA.
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