Aerospace, Defense, & Government Systems

Radar technology is essential for defense, surveillance, and navigation, but increasing data demands, adaptability requirements, and environmental challenges push system designs to the limit.

FPGAs provide unmatched performance by integrating high-speed data converters, advanced signal processing blocks, and scalable resources into compact, efficient packages. One customer shared that using Altera’s Agilex™ 9 Direct RF FPGAs and SoCs helped to ‘shrink a refrigerator-sized piece of equipment down to a Rubik’s Cube’. These capabilities enable radar systems to handle growing bandwidth requirements, perform digital beamforming, and track multiple targets in real time—all while maintaining reliability in demanding environments.

Engineered for long-term durability, FPGAs adapt seamlessly to evolving mission needs, ensuring radar systems remain robust, efficient, and ready for the future.

Explore Altera devices for radar applications: Agilex™ 5, Agilex™ 7, Agilex ™ 9.

Electronic Warfare (EW) is central to modern defense, requiring rapid adaptability and precision to address the increasing complexity of electronic threats. High bandwidth demands, frequency agility, and ultra-low latency are among the key challenges designers face in developing effective EW systems.

FPGAs offer unmatched flexibility and performance, enabling EW systems to manage high bandwidths, adapt across frequency ranges, and respond to threats in real time. By integrating advanced signal processing and reconfigurable resources into compact, efficient designs, FPGAs deliver the adaptability and speed essential for real-time responsiveness.

Discover devices for Electronic Warfare applications: Agilex™ 5, Agilex™ 7, Agilex ™ 9.

Secure communications demand adaptability, reliability, and efficiency under strict SWaP (size, weight, and power) constraints. To address these demands, FPGAs enable software-defined waveforms, advanced signal processing, and low-latency multi-channel data handling.

Strict logic separation ensures encrypted and unencrypted data protection, while hardened cryptographic services, including cryptographic blocks and key management subsystems, provide secure encryption, authentication, and compliance with military standards.

With multiple processors, FPGAs enable independent task operation and reduce SWaP burdens through compact, efficient designs. They incorporate anti-tamper features and resilience in harsh conditions, delivering reliable performance, and making them indispensable for UAVs, naval systems, and other mission-critical applications.

Explore devices for Secure Communications applications: Agilex™ 3, Agilex™ 5.

In aerospace and avionics, where safety and precision are critical, FPGAs provide unparalleled reliability, efficiency, and adaptability. They enable compliance with rigorous safety standards like DO-254 by supporting redundant, independent processing paths for safety-critical functions, such as real-time sensor data processing in avionics systems.

Discover Altera devices for Aerospace & Avionics applications: Agilex™ 3, Agilex™ 5, Agilex ™ 7.

In a data-driven world, government agencies face the dual challenge of managing massive datasets while achieving cost efficiency and performance gains.

FPGAs provide a versatile solution, boosting performance through parallel processing and optimizing data restructuring for faster searches and retrievals. For example, leveraging FPGAs for disk compression and erasure encoding can reduce RAID redundancy, reducing the number of hard drives from 10 to 6, significantly lowering costs. Tools like Apache Arrow and Pulsar further utilize FPGAs to streamline unstructured data processing, enabling quick access to critical information.

By delivering speed, scalability, and minimized hardware footprints, FPGAs help agencies meet current demands and adapt to evolving technological needs.

Discover devices for Government Analytics applications: Agilex™ 3, Agilex™ 5, Agilex ™ 7.

In the evolving landscape of High-Performance Computing (HPC), FPGAs are redefining complex simulations and large-scale data processing with superior power efficiency and customizability.

FPGAs excel in power-sensitive applications, delivering high performance at lower energy costs in tasks like radio telescopes and large-scale simulations. Their tailored designs optimize repetitive workloads, such as floating-point computations and real-time weather analysis, driving faster decisions and improved accuracy.

By enhancing memory bandwidth and parallel processing, FPGAs outperform conventional solutions, enabling organizations to achieve peak performance and energy efficiency as HPC demands grow.

Explore devices for High Performance Compute applications: Agilex™ 3, Agilex™ 5, Agilex ™ 7.

Drones and decoys are playing an increasingly important role in modern defense operations, supporting intelligence gathering, surveillance, electronic warfare, and mission execution in contested environments. As these systems become more autonomous and capable, designers must balance increasing processing demands with strict size, weight, power, and cost (SWaP-C) constraints while maintaining reliable communications, navigation, and sensor performance.

FPGAs provide the flexibility and performance needed to support a wide range of unmanned and attritable platforms. In smaller Group 1 and Group 2 systems, FPGAs enable low-latency sensor interfacing, motor control, and edge processing within highly constrained form factors. For larger Group 3 through Group 5 platforms, FPGAs serve as high-performance processing and sensor aggregation engines, supporting multi-sensor fusion, autonomy, electronic warfare, spectrum sensing, secure communications, and advanced navigation capabilities. These same adaptable architectures can also support decoy systems that require real-time responsiveness, mission flexibility, and reliable operation in dynamic threat environments.

Engineered for long operational lifecycles and evolving mission requirements, FPGAs provide a scalable foundation that enables unmanned and decoy platforms to adapt to emerging threats while maintaining performance at the tactical edge.

Explore Altera devices for Drones & Decoys applications: Agilex® 3, Agilex® 5, Agilex® 7, Agilex® 9.

Precision-Guided Munitions (PGMs) play a critical role in modern defense operations, requiring accurate navigation, target identification, and real-time decision making in increasingly contested environments. From guided artillery and loitering munitions to advanced missile systems, designers must balance precision, responsiveness, and mission effectiveness within highly constrained size, weight, power, and cost (SWaP-C) requirements.

FPGAs provide the performance and flexibility needed to support advanced PGM architectures by enabling sensor fusion, precision guidance, navigation, autonomy, and secure communications. Integrating high-speed processing, adaptable I/O, and real-time signal processing capabilities into a single device allows PGMs to process sensor data, track targets, support electronic warfare payloads, and execute mission-critical guidance functions with low latency and high reliability.

Discover Altera devices for Precision-Guided Munitions applications: Agilex® 3, Agilex® 5, Agilex® 7, Agilex® 9.