Altera adds to its FPGA high-speed transceiver portfolio, reaching 11.3 Gbits/s

Underlining the importance of high-speed serial transceivers to FPGA applications—if any emphasis were really needed—Altera today announced two new 40 nm FPGA family branches that increase the transceiver capability of the Stratix IV and Arria II families. The company said that the Stratix IV GT, with up to 24 11.3 Gbit/s transceivers per chip is now shipping. The GT is essentially a Stratix IV GX device, but with the secret-sauce LC tank circuit on the transceivers retuned from 9.9 GHz to 11.3 GHz and some internal timing margins increased. The parts offer up to 530 K logic elements, 20.3 Mbits of internal RAM and 1024 18×18 multipliers.

The company at the same time announced that it planned to ship the Arria II GX at some point in the second quarter of this year. The Arria II GX offers slower, simplified transceivers running at up to 3.75 Gbits/s, and up to 256 K logic elements, 8.5 Mbits of RAM, and 736 multipliers with 600 I/Os. Thus only in comparison to the largest Altera Stratix or Xilinx Virtex devices can the Arria II FPGAs be considered small. These, like the Xilinx Spartan chips, have become system-capable platforms.

The major functional difference between the Stratix and Arria transceivers, according to Altera, is that the latter do not have the elaborate programmable preemphasis and equalization circuitry used on the Stratix parts, saving both die area and power. Altera estimates that the Arria II GX devices will consume about half the power of similarly-sized 65 or 90 nm FPGAs in similar applications using the transceivers.

The company said that the Stratix IV GT branch was itself divided into two parts: one pair of devices with 12 11.3 Gbit transceivers, intended for 40 Gbit/s applications, and four devices with 24 of the fast transceivers, designed and with pin-outs set for 100 Gbit/s applications. The whole family is targeted rather closely at the wireline communications infrastructure market, where Altera is clearly betting on significant physical-plant retooling in the next year or two.

There was no mention of an 11.3 Gbit enhancement for the HardCopy IV GX devices at this time.