TrellisWare Employs Altera's Stratix II FPGAs in New RapidFire Development Platform

Stratix II FPGA-Based Development Platform Enables a Seamless Migration Path to HardCopy II Structured ASICs

San Jose, Calif., October 24, 2007—Altera Corporation (NASDAQ: ALTR) today announced its Stratix® II FPGAs are featured in TrellisWare Technologies’ new RapidFire development board. The RapidFire development board enables fast prototyping and testing of complex physical-layer designs. The board hosts two Stratix II FPGAs, which offer designers a high-density solution rich in logic and RAM blocks, ideal for hardware acceleration of even the most advanced commercial and military communication architectures. The RapidFire development board allows customers to target either a Stratix II FPGA or a pin- and package-compatible HardCopy® II structured ASIC solution for production. 

“RapidFire is a major breakthrough for communication system designers,” said Metin Bayram, director of FEC and high-speed modem solutions at TrellisWare. “With the Stratix II FPGAs, RapidFire can produce in seconds performance results that typically took a C-simulation environment days or weeks.”

Stratix II FPGAs bring a high-performance, high-density solution to the RapidFire development board, allowing customers to evaluate TrellisWare’s full range of waveform, high-speed modem and forward error correction (FEC) intellectual property (IP) products. In addition, RapidFire enables evaluation of TrellisWare’s Chameleon, a powerful, low-power FEC ASIC which implements TrellisWare’s Flexible Low Density Parity Check (F-LDPC) technology.

Through the RapidFire environment, customers can develop, test and prototype advanced military communications systems, and seamlessly implement their design into either a Stratix II FPGA or HardCopy II structured ASIC.  By scaling their completed designs to a HardCopy II structured ASIC, customers can gain a size, weight and power (SWaP) advantage.

“TrellisWare has a rich tradition of offering advanced communications IP solutions for the military and commercial markets, and we believe this solution is the start of a long relationship between the two companies,” said Amr El-Ashmawi, senior business unit manager of Altera’s military/aerospace market. “The use of our Stratix II FPGAs within the RapidFire development board provides designers a flexible, high-performance FPGA architecture that they can use to develop the most advanced communications systems.”

Altera and TrellisWare will demonstrate the RapidFire development board in Altera’s booth 1430 at MILCOM 2007 held in Orlando, Fla., October 29 through 31. The demonstration will include an F-LDPC implementation in Stratix II FPGAs, which will encode and decode a very high-throughput data stream (up to 1 Gbps) with injected noise. For more information about the TrellisWare RapidFire development board, visit www.trellisware.com.

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