Boosting bandwidth
1 min read
Responding to growing demand for transceiver technology from a range of applications, Altera has added the Stratix IV GT and the Arria II GX fpga ranges to its portfolio. Both are 40nm parts.
According to Luanne Schurrmeister, senior director of low cost product marketing, the company is seeing an inflexion point for transceiver based fpgas because of bandwidth requirements. "People want video in their hands," she said, "and this need to compress, transmit and display video is requiring a global upgrade in infrastructure."
But it's not just personal communications. Schirrmeister said that industrial Ethernet is also becoming very popular in the factory automation sector.
The Stratix IV GT has up to 48 transceivers -- 24 running at 11.3Gbit/s and 24 at 6.5Gbit/s -- along with 'lots of ram' and dsp functionality. The Arria II GX, meanwhile, is optimised for power consumption and cost. It features up to 16 3.75Gbit/s transceivers.
The six devices in the Stratix IV GT range are shipping now, while the first Arria II GX part will be available in May 2009.
