February 7, '09; BANGALORE: The significant numbers in India of silicon solution providers now have the ability to create cost sensitive, power-frugal ( below 5 watts) consumer products on the one hand -- and high-performance enterprise or mission-critical systems at the zippiest clock speeds currently possible: over 11 GBPS.

San Jose (Ca/ US) based Altera Corp has just introduced two new families of field programmable gate arrays with built in transceivers:

The Arria II GX device family are claimed to be the lowest powered offerings at 3.75 GBPS, their low cost suited to consumer applications like digital players,video cameras or mobile computers, as well as wireless remote head station equipment for the communication industry.

The Stratix IV GT FPGAs on the other hand are the first in the industry to include transceivers operating at 11.3 GBPS. High end communication equipment and military systems are potential candidates for this family.

At the launch event, Altera's India country manager Gangatharan Gopal, suggested that automotive inboard systems, broadcast and high definition studio equipment, high end networked storage management and medical diagnostics would be areas where Indian design houses will find an edge with the new Stratix IV GT lineup.

Also updated is Altera's Quartus II design software, now in its version 9.0.

Hand in hand with the new Stratix offering comes the equivalent HardCopy ASIC, Altera's proprietary 'short cut' to realising silicon-functionality without having to actually go to a foundry or fab.

Product details at company site:
http://www.altera.com/products/devices/arria-fpgas/arria-ii-gx/aiigx-index.jsp?f=hp&k=pb2-1
http://www.altera.com/b/stratix-iv-gt-transceiver.html?f=hp&k=pb3-0