Altera starts shipping 40nm FPGAs

Altera has announced silicon availability of 40nm field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) for communications, broadcast, test, medical and military applications. The Stratix IV series, which the company claimed are the industry's first 40nm FPGAs, offers 230K logic elements (LEs), 36 embedded transceivers operating up to 8.5Gbps, 17Mb of RAM and 1,288 embedded multipliers.

The new Altera Stratix IV FPGA family, which is comprised of an enhanced (E) version and transceiver-based (GX) version, offers up to 680K logic elements and is 35% faster than competing solutions, claimed Altera. The devices also support DDR3 memory interface speeds of 1067Mbps and feature up to 48 transceivers operating up to 8.5Gbps, enabling the development of next-generation communication infrastructures, the company highlighted.

Stratix IV GX FPGAs incorporate up to four cores for PCI Express Gen1 and Gen2 (x1, x4 and x8) and support a range of protocols including Serial RapidIO, Gigabit Ethernet, XAUI, CPRI (including 6G CPRI), CEI 6G, GPON, SFI-5.1 and Interlaken.

Altera's new 40nm FPGA series target next-generation markets such as VoIP, 4G wireless and digital TV, according to David Greenfield, the company's senior director of high-end products.

The Stratix IV GX EP4SGX230 is currently shipping, with other family variants scheduled to ship in 2009, according to the company.