Altera Quartus II Software v13.1 Delivers Up to 70 Percent Reduction in Compile Times

Release Includes Compile Time Advancements and Enhanced High-Level Design Flows to Increase Productivity

San Jose, Calif., November 5 2013—Altera Corporation (NASDAQ: ALTR) today announced the release of its Quartus® II software version 13.1, extending its industry leadership in software productivity by delivering on average 30 percent and up to 70 percent reduction in compile times compared to the previous version, through significant algorithm optimization and increased parallelization. The software also includes the newly available Rapid Recompile feature for customers making small source code changes on Altera Stratix® V FPGA designs. With Rapid Recompile, customers can reuse previous compilation results to preserve performance, without the need for up-front design partitioning, and achieve an additional 50 percent compile time savings.

“Our Quartus II software has been able to evolve with each generation of FPGA products because of our superior and proven software architecture that was designed right the first time,” said Alex Grbic, director, software and IP product marketing. “With new capabilities and enhancements to the latest version of the Quartus II software, we are delivering a 2X compile time advantage and a 20 percent performance advantage over the competition with our high-end FPGAs.”

This latest version extends the Quartus II software’s leadership by also delivering enhancements to high-level design tools, so customers can maximize productivity and benefit from the leading-edge capabilities of Altera devices. Quartus II software version 13.1 delivers enhancements to its Qsys system integration tool, DSP Builder model based design environment and the Altera SDK for OpenCL™.

• Altera Qsys system integration tool saves significant time and effort throughout the FPGA design cycle by automatically connecting together intellectual property (IP) functions and subsystems. Using Qsys, designers can seamlessly integrate a mix of industry-standard interfaces, including Avalon, ARM® AMBA AXI, APB and AHB interfaces, for faster system development. In Quartus II software v13.1, Qsys further improves productivity with enhanced system visualization, allowing multiple simultaneous views of the Qsys system. This makes modifying the system, either by adding or connecting components to new a peripheral, much easier.
• Altera SDK for OpenCL is now in full production and is the industry’s only FPGA OpenCL solution to pass conformance testing by adhering to the OpenCL specification defined by the Khronos Group. It provides a software-friendly programming environment to design high-performance systems that use FPGAs on Altera’s Preferred Board Partner Program boards or Altera SoCs when using the Altera Cyclone® V SoC development board.
• Altera DSP Builder Design Tool enables system developers to effectively implement high-performance, fixed- and floating-point algorithms into their digital signal processing (DSP) designs. To give engineers more options and flexibility during the design phase, Altera DSP Builder Advanced Blockset systems can now be integrated within MathWorks HDL Coder. Improvements in fast Fourier transform (FFT) processing include variable-sizing of FFTs at run-time and super-sampling FFTs for extremely high data rates of 10GHz, giving unprecedented performance and flexibility options to those implementing this common DSP function.

Quartus II software version 13.1 includes Altera’s best-in-class IP, offering up to 70 percent lower latency and more than 50 percent resource utilization reduction while maintaining customer’s performance and throughput of the most heavily used and highest performance IP. These IP cores cover 10G, 40G and 100G Ethernet, and 25G to 150G Interlaken.

For additional information about the features offered in Quartus II software v13.1, visit Altera’s What’s New in Quartus II Software web page.

Pricing and Availability

Both the Subscription Edition and the free Web Edition of Quartus II software v13.1 are now available for download. Altera’s software subscription program makes it easy to obtain Altera design software by consolidating software products and maintenance charges into one annual subscription payment. Subscribers receive Quartus II software, the ModelSim®-Altera Starter edition, and a full license to the IP Base Suite, which includes Altera’s most popular IP (DSP and memory) cores. The annual software subscription is $2,995 for a node-locked PC license and is available for purchase at Altera's eStore.

The annual software subscription for the Altera SDK for OpenCL is $995 for a node-locked PC license. For additional information about the Altera Preferred Board Partner Program for OpenCL and its partner members, or to see a list of all supported boards and links to purchase, visit the OpenCL section on Altera’s website.

About Altera

Altera® programmable solutions enable designers of electronic systems to rapidly and cost effectively innovate, differentiate and win in their markets. Altera offers FPGAs, SoCs, CPLDs, ASICs and complementary technologies, such as power management, to provide high-value solutions to customers worldwide. altera.com