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Altera has unveiled its family of ARM-based SoC FPGAs. The devices integrate 28-nm Cyclone V and Arria V FPGA fabric, a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore processor, error correcting code (ECC) protected memory controllers, peripherals and high-bandwidth interconnect into a single chip.
These SoC FPGAs benefit from ARM’s ecosystem of software development tools, debuggers, operating systems, middleware and applications and users will be able to leverage Altera’s SoC FPGA development flow to create customised ARM-based systems that reduce embedded system board size, power and cost. The new family will target the automotive, industrial, video surveillance, wireless infrastructure, computer and storage markets.
“SoC FPGAs based on 28nm process technology represent an exciting new development for embedded systems in terms of performance and increased capacity,” said Jim Nicholas, vice president marketing, processor division, ARM. “These devices offer great promise by enabling embedded system designers to reduce time to market, decrease costs and improve energy efficiency, while benefiting from the broad support of the ARM software ecosystem.”
Altera’s Cyclone V and Arria V SoC FPGAs feature a processor system with a dual-core 800 MHz ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore processor, NEON media processing engine, single/double-precision floating point unit, L1 and L2 caches, ECC-protected memory controllers, ECC-protected scratchpad memory and a wide range of commonly used peripherals. The processor system can deliver 4,000 DMIPS peak performance for less than 1.8 watts. The processor system and FPGA fabric are powered independently and can be configured and booted in any order. Once in operation, the FPGA portion can be powered down as needed to conserve system power.
The ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore processor system and FPGA are interconnected by high throughput data paths, providing over 125-Gbps peak bandwidth with integrated data coherency. This level of performance is not possible in two-chip solutions. An integrated single-chip SoC FPGA allows board designers to eliminate the external I/O paths between a processor and an FPGA, providing significant system power savings.
The Cyclone V and Arria V SoC FPGAs are based on a low-power 28-nm process (28LP) and feature embedded transceivers that operate up to 5-Gbps and 10-Gbps respectively. The FPGA fabric includes variable-precision DSP blocks and up to three ECC-protected memory controllers. Altera's Cyclone V SoC FPGAs feature up to 110K logic elements (LEs) and provide performance levels that make the devices suitable for differentiating high-volume applications, including next-generation industrial drive on a chip, advanced driver assistance and video surveillance.
The Arria V SoC FPGAs look to balance cost and performance with the lowest total power for mid-range applications and features up to 460K LEs and are ideal for meeting the higher performance requirements in applications that include remote radio heads, LTE base stations and multi-function printers.
Altera’s SoC FPGAs look to boost productivity by offering users common tools and development flows that support both the Cortex-A9 MPCore processor and the FPGA. Designers can create custom peripherals and hardware accelerators using Altera’s Quartus II software and integrate them with the processor system using Altera’s Qsys system integration tool.
Software development for systems based on SoC FPGAs can begin immediately on Altera’s SoC FPGA Virtual Target.
