Altera offers low-cost serial transceivers in Cyclone FPGA update

EDN Europe, 09 Nov 2009

Altera’s low-cost FPGA family, Cyclone, has moved on a generation with the introduction of the Cyclone IV series. There are two variants; one, the GX, is upgraded with the addition of fast serial transceivers; and the other, the E version, optimises the series for low power with high logic density, lowering power (for equivalent functionality buy a claimed 25% over Cyclone III parts. GX devices have up to 150K logic elements (LEs), up to 6.5-Mbits of RAM, up to 360 multipliers, and up to eight integrated 3.125-Gbps transceivers supporting mainstream protocols including Gigabit Ethernet (GbE), SDI, CPRI, V-by-One; the devices also have “hard” dedicated logic for PCI Express (PCIe), saving around 15k logic elements compared to implementing the interface in the programmable array. The diffused PCIe block offers one, two, or four-lane operation and needs only two power rails. You can, Altera says, create a PCIe-to-Gigabit Ethernet bridge that will use only 1.5W, in one of these devices. Included in this range, Altera adds, is the lowest-cost entry-point device that offers fast serial transceivers – two on the smallest part in the series, up to eight on the largest – on a programmable chip.
Altera will deliver the EP4CGX15 and EP4CE115, the first Cyclone IV GX and Cyclone IV E devices respectively, in the first quarter of 2010, at prices of $3 and $6 respectively (250k). Packaging is all-wire-bonded, to control costs, also restricting the speed of the serial transceivers to the 3.125 Gbit/sec figure; however, Altera says that this speed is sufficient for the target applications in the market that cyclone IV addresses. The three smallest Cyclone IV GX devices will be supported in the Quartus® II design software version 9.1 with the remaining Cyclone IV devices supported in the Quartus II design software version 9.1 service pack 1.