Altera Corporation announced the availability of the Cyclone III family, the company's first 65-nm FPGAs. It is said that the Cyclone III FPGAs consume 75 percent less power than competing FPGAs and deliver 5K to 120K logic elements (LEs), up to 4 Mbits of memory and up to 288 digital signal processing (DSP) multipliers. At 20 percent lower cost per logic element than the previous generation, the Cyclone III family enables designers to use FPGAs in more cost-sensitive applications than previously possible.
Eric Wildi, chief electronics officer at Emerson Climate Technologies, said, "We have received our first Cyclone III devices and are adopting them for our high-performance embedded motor control programs. The compelling architecture innovations in Cyclone III FPGAs, such as performance and abundant memory, enable us to cost-effectively deliver greater functionality compared to conventional microcontroller and DSP solutions."
Louie Leung, marketing director of Altera, stated, "The Cyclone III family can handle more applications than any other competing solution because of its unprecedented combination of low power, high functionality and low cost. More than 250 customers who participated in the Altera early access program are already designing Cyclone III FPGAs into a wide range of applications that target consumer, automotive, military, industrial and wireless communications markets."
Altera
