Density, Architectural, Productivity and Processor Performance Leadership Enable SoCs to Target Widest Range of Applications
Altera Corporation announced production availability of its Cyclone V SoCs and engineering sample availability of its Arria V SoCs. With increased processor peak clock frequencies — Cyclone V SoCs at 925 MHz for commercial-grade and 700 MHz for automotive-grade, and Arria V SoCs at 1.05 GHz for industrial-grade — these devices are the FPGA industry’s highest performing SoCs. Altera SoCs provide embedded developers the most robust architecture, highest productivity development tools and broadest range of densities.
Altera offers the industry’s broadest range of densities with its 28 nm SoCs, ranging from 25K logic elements (LE) up to 460K LE. This density range allows Altera SoCs to be integrated into a variety of embedded systems, ranging from cost-sensitive industrial automation and automotive driver assist systems to applications that require higher-performance, including remote radio units, 10G/40G line cards and broadcast studio equipment. Increasing the core frequency of the dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore processor enables the devices to meet performance requirements of an even greater number of embedded systems.
Altera SoCs combine a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor system with FPGA logic on a single device. Altera SoCs include several distinctive features (32-bit error correction code, a high-bandwidth memory controller with built in memory protection, flexible boot capability and integrated PCI Express across all SoCs) that enable developers in the wireless communications, industrial, video surveillance, automotive and medical equipment markets to create custom SoC variants optimized for system power, board space, performance and cost requirements.
Altera SoCs are supported by a broad ecosystem of operating systems, design tools, development kits, and software-development solutions from Altera, ARM and third parties. The Altera SoC Embedded Design Suite (EDS) allows embedded developers to jumpstart their firmware and application software development by offering a comprehensive tool suite that includes development tools, utility programs and application examples. At the heart of the SoC EDS is the exclusive ARM Development Studio 5 (DS-5) Altera Edition Toolkit. This toolkit combines the ARM DS-5 advanced multicore debugging capabilities with FPGA-adaptivity for unprecedented full-chip debugging visibility and control.
Availability
Cyclone V SoCs are shipping today in production in 85K LE and 110K LE densities and are available with all three transceiver option variants (SE, SX and ST). Cyclone V SoCs offer a single- or dual-processor core option that operates at a core clock frequency of up to 925 MHz. An automotive-grade Cyclone V SoC operating with a core clock frequency of 700 MHz is also available. These devices are perfectly suited for high-temperature environments.
The largest Arria V SoC with 460K LE is currently shipping engineering samples. The Arria V SoC features a dual-core processor which operates at a core clock frequency of up to 1.05 GHz.
