Altera ships Arria GX Development Kit for low-cost FPGA transceiver-based designs
(Technology News, 07 Nov 2007 )
Altera Corporation has announced the availability of its first development kit for the Arria GX FPGA family, the only risk-free low-cost FPGAs with transceivers. The Arria GX Development Kit delivers a robust environment for the development and testing of designs implementing high-speed serial interfaces such as PCI Express (PCIe), Serial RapidIO (SRIO), and Gigabit Ethernet (Gbe). The kit helps designers achieve significant cost savings and a dramatic reduction in overall design time. The development kit can be used by system designers as a starting point for their own designs.
The Arria GX Development Kit targets PCIe x1 and x4, SRIO, and Gigabit Ethernet designs. It includes a PCI Express form factor board featuring an Arria GX FPGA with 60K logic elements (LEs), 350 user I/O pins and eight transceiver channels.
The kit contains:
The Arria GX Development Board · PCIe x4 edge connector · High-speed mezzanine card (HSMC) connector · 32-Mbyte x16 DDR2 SDRAM operating at 233 MHz
Development Tools · PCIe reference design and complete documentation · Quartus II Web Edition design software · Support for OpenCore Plus intellectual property (IP) megafunctions including PCIe Compiler: x1 and x4, GbE and SRIO · Northwest Logic used the kit to develop their PCI Express platform with Arria GX.
“The combination of our high-performance, multi-DMA engine PCI Express platform with the Altera low-cost Arria GX device delivers an easy-to-use, robust solution,” said Brian Daellenbach, president of Northwest Logic. “Integrating with the Arria GX SERDES was a very quick and easy process. This solution enables designers to efficiently develop low-cost, high-performance PCI Express designs with minimal protocol knowledge.”
