Product Attributes

A. What are the typical FPGA chips

At present, FPGA chips on the market mainly come from Xilinx and Altera, which occupy more than 80% of the FPGA market share. Other FPGA manufacturers’ products are mainly for certain specific applications, for example, Actel mainly produces anti-fuse structure FPGAs to meet the extremely demanding application conditions of aviation and aerospace products. The following are the representative products of two companies, Altera and Xilinx.

Altera’s typical products

Altera’s FPGA devices are roughly divided into three series: one is the low-end Cyclone series; the second is the high-end Stratix series, and the third is the Arriva series which can be easily ASICized between the two.

1. for high-performance Stratix series FPGAs

Stratix series FPGAs can help users to lower risk and higher performance as soon as possible to launch the most advanced high-performance products. Combining high density, high performance, and rich features, the Stratix family of FPGAs can integrate more features and increase system bandwidth. The features of the Stratix family of product generations are revolutionary and continue to evolve. The launch dates and process technologies of the Stratix family of FPGAs are shown in Table 1-1.

Table 1-1 Stratix Series Table

Stratix FPGAs and Stratix GX models are the earliest models in Altera’s Stratix FPGA family. This family of high-performance FPGAs introduces DSP hardcore intellectual property (IP) modules and Altera’s widely used TriMatrix on-chip memory and flexible I/O architecture.

The Stratix II FPGA and Stratix II GX models introduce the Adaptive Logic Module (ALM) architecture, which replaces the 4-input LUT with a high-performance 8-input segmented lookup table (LUT). II GX FPGAs and they are still highly recommended for new designs.

Stratix III FPGAs are the industry’s lowest-power, high-performance 65nm FPGAs. can take advantage of logic type (L), memory, and DSP enhancement (E) to combine the user’s design resource requirements without designing with much larger resources than required, thus saving boards, shortening compilation time, and reducing costs. strategic III FPGAs are primarily designed for high-end core system processing for many applications.

Stratix IV FPGAs offer the highest density, best performance, and lowest power consumption of any 40nm FPGA. Stratix IV FPGA family offers enhanced (E) and enhanced devices with transceivers (GX and GT) to meet the needs of many markets and applications such as wireless and fixed-line communications, military, broadcast, and more, this high-performance 40nm FPGA family includes best-in-class 11.3 Gbps transceivers.

Stratix V FPGAs achieve the highest bandwidth and highest system integration of any 28nm FPGA and are extremely flexible. The device family includes 14.1 Gbps (GS and GX) models with backplane compatible, chip-to-chip, and chip-to-module functionality, as well as 28G (GT) transceiver models supporting chip-to-chip and chip-to-module with more than one million LEs and 4,096 precision-tunable DSP modules.

Altera Stratix 10 FPGAs with Intel’s 14nm triple-gate technology offer the best performance, bandwidth, and system integration of any FPGA, and very low power consumption. strategic 10 devices feature 56Gbps transceivers, 28Gbps backplanes, floating-point digital signal processing (DSP) performance, and support for enhanced IEEE 754 The Stratix 10 SoC is the first high-end SoC family in Intel’s 14nm triple-gate transistor technology with a next-generation hard-core processor system optimized for optimal performance per watt.