US-based Altera has announced that it has launched its new series of SoC FPGA, which is on the ARM technology. The SoC FPGA combines the dual core ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore Processor, 28 nm Cyclone V and Arria V FPGA fabric, high bandwidth interconnect, peripherals and error correcting code (ECC) secured memory controllers.
The Cyclone V and Arria V-based processor systems also consist of the ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore processor of 800 MHz, L1 and L2 Caches, NEON media processing engine, ECC protected scratchpad memory and single/double precision floating point unit. The processor system has the capacity of 4,000 DMIPS with a power consumption that is lower than 1.8 W. The FPGA portion and the processor system both have separate power connections and can be started or configured in any order. Even when the processor system is on, the FPGA section alone can be shut down in order to save power consumption. The processor system and the FPGA are connected through a bandwidth capacity of 125 Gbps. The Cyclone V and Arria V processor systems also come with transceivers that have a capacity of up to 5 Gbps and 10 Gbps.
While the Cyclone V SoC FPGA has logic elements of up to 110 K that makes it ideal for applications requiring high volumes, the Arria V SoC FPGA has logic elements of 460 K, which makes it suitable for medium applications. The Soc FPGAs can be integrated with Altera’s SoC FPGA development flow to enhance productivity. Users can also customise their peripherals by the use of Quartus II software and by integrating it with the Qsys system integration tool from Altera. While the SoC FPGA Virtual Target is currently available for purchase, the SoC FPGA silicon will be available by the end of 2012.
Source: http://www.altera.com