Altera Stratix IV User Guide Lite

By Laiq Chughtai, Altera Corp.
edadesignline.com (May 27, 2009)

What is the purpose of this paper?

This paper provides potential users an easily read and easy-to-understand overview of the capabilities of the device functions of Altera's Stratix IV FPGAs. It succinctly describes the feature set, the architecture innovations, and the process techniques that when combined make the Stratix IV FPGA the industry leader in both power and performance. Further, the article describes the functionality of these devices in far more detail than in the data sheet, but avoids the minute implementation details covered in the Stratix IV FPGA Device Handbook.

Designers contemplating designing with Stratix IV FPGAs may face a hurdle or two. The data sheet provides a very condensed overview of the complete device family, but does not describe the capabilities in enough detail. By comparison, the Device Handbook provides all the details that the designer needs, but — at 1,200+ pages — it probably will require several weeks of work to read and understand all of the details.

This paper describes the capabilities (what you can do) in detail, but leaves out the implementation details (how to utilize the capabilities). The idea is to give the designer enough information to evaluate the capabilities, without requiring weeks of study. Altera believes that system architects and designers who are in the early stages of FPGA device planning and evaluation will find the information presented here to be a valuable source of information before beginning a Stratix IV design.

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