Altera Ships Industry's Highest Density Transceiver FPGAs

Shipment Marks Latest Milestone in the Successful Rollout of Stratix IV FPGA Family

San Jose, Calif., March 172009 -- Altera Corporation (NASDAQ: ALTR) today announced silicon availability of the industry’s highest density transceiver FPGA. As the second member of the Altera® Stratix® IV GX FPGA family to ship, the EP4SGX530 is 60 percent larger than the largest transceiver FPGA on the market. The device offers 530K logic elements (LEs), up to 48 transceivers operating at up to 8.5 Gbps, 20.3 Mbits of RAM and 1,040 embedded multipliers. Stratix IV GX devices target numerous applications in the communications, broadcast, test, medical and military markets.

“Agilent is committed to providing test equipment that accelerates the turn-on and debug phase of emerging high-speed interconnects,” said Jun Chie, marketing manager for Agilent’s logic and protocol test tools. “The high performance of the Altera Stratix IV FPGA and its availability today is playing an important role in Agilent’s ability to continue meeting its commitment to industry leaders.”

Stratix IV GX FPGAs incorporate up to four hard intellectual property (IP) cores for PCI Express Gen1 and Gen2 (x1, x4 and x8), and also support a wide range of protocols including Serial RapidIO®, 40G/100G Ethernet, XAUI, CPRI (including 6G CPRI), CEI-6G, GPON, SFI-5.1 and Interlaken. For more information on the market-leading features within Altera Stratix IV FPGAs, visit www.altera.com/pr/stratix4.

“In the communications infrastructure market, it is critical to deliver innovative solutions quickly to comply with the latest standards,” said Thomas Rasmussen, vice president, product line management, TPACK. “The flexibility, low power consumption and extensive serial interface support of Altera’s Stratix IV GX FPGAs enabled us to rapidly develop and deliver the TPX4004, the industry’s first 40-nm carrier Ethernet switch.”

“The market is hungry for a solution the delivers more bandwidth and lower power consumption,” said Luanne Schirrmeister, Altera Corporation’s senior director, component product marketing.  “The strong response we’ve seen from customers prove the Stratix IV GX devices offer the right combination of data rate, power consumption, bandwidth and data processing capabilities required for next-generation applications, such as video over IP, 4G wireless and digital TV.”

Stratix IV GX FPGA Availability

The Stratix IV GX EP4SGX530 and EP4SGX230 devices are currently shipping, with other family members scheduled to ship in 2009. For more information on Stratix IV FPGAs, visit www.altera.com/pr/stratix4.

About Altera

Altera programmable solutions enable system and semiconductor companies to rapidly and cost effectively innovate, differentiate and win in their markets. Find out more at http://www.altera.com.