Altera Ahead of the Pack with Excalibur Solutions

Leading Development Tools, Debugging Solutions, and Operating System Support Available for Altera''s Embedded Processor Solutions

San Jose, Calif., May 6, 2002 -- Altera Corporation (Nasdaq: ALTR) today announced the availability of its Excalibur^™ solutions pack, offering a suite of the industry's leading development tools, debugging solutions, and operating system support for embedded systems designs. The solutions pack provides embedded software designers with access to Altera utilities and third-party applications for building system-on-a-programmable-chip (SOPC) designs with Altera's embedded processor solutions.

The Excalibur solutions pack ships as a set of CD-ROMs to all registered Excalibur developers using the Excalibur EPXA10 Development Kit.

"With its Excalibur solutions pack, Altera has ensured that the appropriate tools are available in each stage of the Excalibur design flow, with compiler technology, source-level debugging solutions, trace capability, and support for real-time operating systems," said Neil Henderson, general manager of Accelerated Technology, Embedded Systems Division of Mentor Graphics. "The completeness of Altera's embedded processor solutions allows its customers to develop and debug their SOPC designs quickly and efficiently."

The Excalibur solutions pack includes Altera's Excalibur utilities and resources CD-ROM which contains utilities, reference designs, OpenCore^® Plus evaluation intellectual property (IP) cores, application notes, reference documents, and the Excalibur stripe simulator (ESS), as well as demo and evaluation versions of leading third-party development tools.

The ESS is a functional stripe simulation model developed to facilitate the integration of software and hardware on Altera's Excalibur embedded processor devices. The ESS can execute more than 500K ARM^® instructions per second with visibility into the internal processor and stripe registers and processor-to-PLD bus transactions. The ESS is an instruction set simulator that connects to the GNU debugger (GDB), Mentor Graphics' XRAY^® debugger, or ARM Developer Suite (ADS) AXD debugger. The ESS can be instantiated in a hardware design for simulation in a third-party logic simulator, such as Mentor Graphics' Model Technology^™ ModelSim^® simulation tool.

The Excalibur solutions pack third-party demonstration and evaluation tools include:

Mentor Graphics' (Nasdaq: MENT) Nucleus^® PLUS LV and XRAY debugger: The Mentor Graphics' Nucleus PLUS LV real-time operating system (RTOS) is an evaluation version of Nucleus PLUS and is fully ported to run on the EXPA10 development board. The XRAY debugger for Excalibur devices is a multi-window graphical tool supporting source-level debugging of C/C++ applications developed with either the ARM Development Suite or GNUPro compiler.
OSE Systems' OSE real-time operating system: The OSE Systems Excalibur demo CD-ROM shows the OSE real-time operating system running on the Excalibur device. The PLD loader in the demo CD enables the application to reconfigure the logic area in the Excalibur device and instantiate OSE drivers for the devices at runtime.
Red Hat, Inc.'s (Nasdaq: RHAT) Embedded Linux: The Red Hat CD contains a working demonstration of Red Hat Embedded Linux generated for the Excalibur platform. The demo version of Red Hat Embedded Linux allows users to experience the look-and-feel of building an Excalibur system by simulating the generation of executables and a kernel from source Red Hat package manager RPMs. Red Hat's RedBoot is used as the boot loader and Journaling Flash File System, version 2 (JFFS2).
Beach Solutions' EASI-Integrator: Beach Solutions' Embedded Application System Interface (EASI) toolkit automates the design and documentation of both hardware and software interfaces for new IP blocks implemented in Altera's Excalibur devices.

"Altera has worked closely with the embedded tool vendors to provide our customers with everything they need to easily and quickly leverage the full power of our Excalibur devices," said Joe Hanson, director of marketing and applications for Altera's Excalibur business unit. "Offering a complete embedded system development solution reduces the time-to-market for SOPC designers, while the wide range of advanced tools allows designers to choose those best suited to their needs."

Pricing and Availability
The Excalibur solutions pack will be shipped to all registered Excalibur developers this month. Altera's Excalibur EPXA1, EPXA4 and EPXA10 devices are all available now. The Excalibur Development Kit featuring the high-density EPXA10 device is available for $9,995, and a lower cost development kit for the EPXA1 device will be available in Q3, 2002. Customers can consult their local Altera sales office or distributor for device and development kit pricing and availability, or visit the Altera web site at http://www.altera.com/products/devices/arm/arm-index.html..

About Altera's Excalibur Embedded Processor Solutions
Combining logic, memory, and an ARM922T^™ hard processor core, Altera's Excalibur embedded processor solutions allow engineers to integrate an entire system on a single FPGA. Excalibur embedded processors can be used in any application requiring processors and programmable logic with up to 38,400 logic elements (1,000,000 gates). They offer full integration with Altera's APEX^™ architecture, and are supported by the optimized Quartus^® II design software. The Excalibur EPXA1 device consists of 4,160 logic elements (LEs) in 484-pin and 672-pin FineLine BGA^™ packages. The mid-range EPXA4 device has 16,640 LEs in 672-pin and 1,020-pin FineLine BGA packages, while the high-end EPXA10 device consists of 38,400 LEs in a 1,020-pin FineLine BGA package. For more information on Altera's Excalibur embedded processor solutions, visit http://www.altera.com/products/devices/excalibur/exc-index.html.

About Altera
Altera Corporation (Nasdaq: ALTR) is the world's pioneer in system-on-a-programmable-chip (SOPC) solutions. Combining programmable logic technology with software tools, intellectual property and technical services, Altera provides high-value programmable solutions to approximately 14,000 customers worldwide. More information is available at http://www.altera.com.

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Altera, The Programmable Solutions Company, the stylized Altera logo, specific device designations and all other words that are identified as trademarks and/or service marks are, unless noted otherwise, the trademarks and service marks of Altera Corporation in the U.S. and other countries. ARM is a registered trademark of ARM Limited. Mentor Graphics, Nucleus, and XRAY are registered trademarks of Mentor Graphics Corporation. All other product or service names are the property of their respective holders.

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Editor Contacts: 

Bruce Fienberg Altera Corporation (408) 544-6397 newsroom@altera.com