Altera Ships Arria GX Development Kit for Low-Cost FPGA Transceiver-Based Designs

San Jose, Calif. October 29, 2007—Altera Corporation today announced the availability of its first development kit for the Arria^TM GX FPGA family, the only risk-free low-cost FPGAs with transceivers. The Arria GX Development Kit delivers a robust environment for the development and testing of designs implementing high-speed serial interfaces such as PCI Express (PCIe), Serial RapidIO^® (SRIO), and Gigabit Ethernet (Gbe). The kit helps designers achieve significant cost savings and a dramatic reduction in overall design time. The development kit can be used by system designers as a starting point for their own designs.

“As the industry transitions from parallel to serial IO, engineers face new, unfamiliar technical risks in both board and FPGA design.” said Luanne Schirrmeister, director of marketing, low-cost products at Altera. “Our Arria GX FPGAs reduce the risk of making the transition and the development kit enables users to quickly verify their system in hardware.”

The Arria GX Development Kit targets PCIe x1 and x4, SRIO, and Gigabit Ethernet designs. It includes a PCI Express form factor board featuring an Arria GX FPGA with 60K logic elements (LEs), 350 user I/O pins and eight transceiver channels.  The kit contains:

The Arria GX Development Board

• PCIe x4 edge connector
• High-speed mezzanine card (HSMC) connector
• 32-Mbyte x16 DDR2 SDRAM operating at 233 MHz

Development Tools

• PCIe reference design and complete documentation
• Quartus® II Web Edition design software
• Support for OpenCore Plus intellectual property (IP) megafunctions including PCIe Compiler: x1 and x4, GbE and SRIO

Northwest Logic used the kit to develop their PCI Express platform with Arria GX.

“The combination of our high-performance, multi-DMA engine PCI Express platform with the Altera low-cost Arria GX device delivers an easy-to-use, robust solution,” said Brian Daellenbach, president of Northwest Logic. “Integrating with the Arria GX SERDES was a very quick and easy process. This solution enables designers to efficiently develop low-cost, high-performance PCI Express designs with minimal protocol knowledge.”

Development Kit Price and Availability

The Arria GX development kit is available now and priced at $995. For more information, visit www.altera.com/products/devkits/altera/kit-arriagx.html.

About Altera

Altera^® programmable solutions enable system and semiconductor companies to rapidly and cost-effectively innovate, differentiate and win in their markets. Find out more at www.altera.com.

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