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Aerospace & Defense
Avionics
Powering Safer, Smarter Avionics with DO-254-Capable FPGAs. Enabling high-performance cockpit displays, sensor fusion, and mission-critical computing.
Reliability for the Flight Deck
In aerospace and avionics, safety and precision are critical. Altera FPGAs provide unparalleled reliability, efficiency, and adaptability. They enable compliance with rigorous safety standards like DO-254 and independent processing paths for real-time sensor data, Cockpit and more applications.
Additionally, these devices streamline multi-channel sensor fusion by integrating high-bandwidth transceivers, a key advantage for commercial and defense avionics electronics. The hardware accelerates radar, SigInt, video aggregation, displays, and EO/IR systems, allowing teams to deploy updates rapidly through a reconfigurable architecture that maintains compliance and lowers lifecycle costs.
The Challenges, and Why FPGA
The Challenge
DO-254 Certification, Mil-temp, SEU, SEL
Engineers must meet DO-254 standards while ensuring hardware survives MIL-temp extremes plus radiation-induced SEU and SEL failures.
Why FPGA
Certifiable, MIL-temp, radiation-safe FPGAs
FPGAs deliver certifiable hardware control that survives extreme MIL-temp environments and high-altitude atmospheric radiation hazards.
The Challenge
Rugged, Certifiable Defense Avionics Design
Mission-critical designs must process dense radar and EO/IR streams under harsh EW jamming while meeting strict military environment specs.
Why FPGA
FPGAs minimize SWaP for dense sensor data.
FPGA and Direct-RF capabilities minimize SWaP by consolidating multi-channel radar, EO/IR, and EW processing onto a single programmable fabric.
The Challenge
Software-Defined Cockpits
Software-defined cockpits need edge AI and instant sensor fusion-reconfigurable logic eliminates costly, time-consuming hardware redesigns.
Why FPGA
FPGAs reduce latency and minimize cockpit SWaP
Latest FPGAs stream seamless video aggregation and multi-display processing to maximize cockpit safety within minimal SWaP limits.
Why Altera
DO-254 Certifiable Architecture
Altera devices provide robust silicon architecture to beat extreme radiation and MIL-temp hazards while easing strict DO-254 paths.
Altera: Scalable, Secure Sensor Fusion
Altera Direct-RF FPGAs consolidate high-bandwidth radar and EO/IR streams onto a low-latency fabric to defeat harsh EW jamming.
Agilex: Adaptive, Next-Gen Cockpits
Altera FPGAs power real-time cockpit AI and sensor fusion, updating instantly to completely avoid hardware redesigns.
Altera VVP Suite: Avionics Displays
With 45+ cores operating above 600 MHz, the VVP Suite delivers sub-frame latency for critical mission display aggregation.
FPGA-Powered Avionics
From cockpit to cloud, our FPGA-based platforms enable safer, smarter, and more connected flight.
- Advanced mission compute
- Sensor fusion
- Electronic warfare
- Secure communication
- Built for the next generation flight
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More Aerospace & Defense Applications
Radar
High-performance FPGA SoCs for real-time radar signal capture, processing, beamforming, tracking.
Electronic Warfare (EW)
Reconfigurable FPGA solutions for low-latency, deterministic, and wideband electronic support, protection, and attack modalities.
Secure Communication
Software-defined, SWaP-optimized FPGAs for secure, tamper-resistant military communications.
Drones & UAVs
Scalable FPGAs from Group 1 to Group 5 unmanned systems and decoy platforms
Precision Guided Munitions
FPGAs for guidance, navigation, and target identification in SWaP-C-constrained munitions.
Common Questions
Altera FPGA resources support independent processing paths and real-time sensor handling for avionics designs targeting DO-254 requirements. Architecture resources address cockpit, communications and computing functions. Device selection alone does not establish that an implemented airborne system meets its assurance requirements.
Altera FPGAs combine video aggregation, sensor fusion and display management for primary flight displays, multifunction displays, head-up displays and mission displays. The Video and Vision Processing Suite provides IP for low-latency display aggregation. Explore FPGA video and vision processing IP
Altera's reconfigurable logic lets avionics teams adapt sensor-fusion, video and computing functions as cockpit requirements evolve. Combining these functions on programmable hardware supports low-latency processing while helping manage size, weight and power.
ARINC 818 IP resources support low-latency cockpit video transport on Altera Agilex FPGAs. They complement high-speed serial interfaces and video-processing fabric for display-system development, providing a protocol-specific resource alongside the broader avionics connectivity and processing portfolio. Explore ARINC 818 FPGA IP core
Altera provides Agilex devices, development kits, video IP, FPGA AI Suite, Platform Designer and security resources. Cockpit display, data-fusion, communications and computing architecture examples give engineers application context for reviewing device capabilities, interface requirements and available evaluation materials. Explore aerospace and defense FPGA solutions
ARINC 818, AFDX, Time-Sensitive Networking and Ethernet are identified for avionics communications. These protocol resources complement high-speed interfaces and programmable processing, giving engineers connectivity options to review alongside cockpit displays, sensor-data handling and embedded computing architectures.