Altera's Cyclone FPGA Family Crosses 5 Million-Unit Mark

Industry’s Leading Low-Cost FPGA Family Breaks New Ground in Price-Sensitive, High-Volume Applications

San Jose, Calif., October 19, 2004 — Altera Corporation (NASDAQ: ALTR) today announced that it has shipped more than 5 million low-cost Cyclone™ FPGAs since the device family was introduced just 21 months ago. Reaching this milestone faster than any other Altera FPGA family, Cyclone devices have proven to be a compelling alternative to ASICs and ASSPs for designers of price-sensitive, high-volume applications. In the hands of over 3,800 customers worldwide, Cyclone devices have expanded Altera’s presence in applications such as video displays, cameras, telematics, home networking, and office automation equipment.

“We have been Xilinx users, but for our most recent home theater processor products, we chose Altera’s Cyclone FPGAs for their clear price/performance advantage,” said Patrick Harkin, vice president of development, Lumagen, Inc. “We were also pleasantly surprised to discover that Altera’s Quartus® II software provided a better Verilog development flow than Xilinx’s tools. In addition, applying constraints to our design was much easier with Quartus II software.”

“Altera Cyclone devices offer performance, flexibility, low cost, and reliable availability in high-volume quantities, enabling Digital V6 to pack industry-leading video compression and other capabilities into our remote network management products,” said Jimmy Lee, president of Digital V6 Corp. “As a result, our Kaveman 16 product hit the market as the undisputed price/performance leader in its segment, and received the Best of Interop award in the Network Servers and Peripherals category.”

Built from the ground up for low cost, Altera’s Cyclone FPGA family set the standard for low-cost FPGAs when it was introduced less than two years ago. The company engaged with more than 100 customers globally during the product definition process to determine the most desired features and price points. The information gathered has benefited Altera’s customers, who now have a risk-free alternative to ASICs and ASSPs.

“With the highest performance and lowest cost structure, Cyclone FPGAs hit a sweet spot in the marketplace,” stated Steve Mensor, Altera’s senior director of product marketing. “Cyclone FPGAs have out-shipped the nearest competitive FPGA family, Spartan-3, by five times, and have three times the number of customers.”

Based on the trailblazing success of Cyclone FPGAs, Altera has already developed its successor family, Cyclone II FPGAs. Supported now in Quartus II development software, the Cyclone II family will begin shipping in early 2005 and will extend the Cyclone advantage to higher densities and even lower cost points. Combined with a broad portfolio of design-ready intellectual property (IP) cores, Altera’s Quartus II design software delivers the lowest development costs for a broad range of Altera FPGAs while giving designers unmatched levels of performance and ease of use.

About the Cyclone Device Family

Cyclone devices are the industry’s lowest-cost FPGAs available today. Cyclone devices are manufactured on TSMC’s advanced 0.13-micron, all-layer-copper process and were developed to provide designers of high-volume, price-sensitive applications the flexibility of an FPGA at ASIC prices. With support for leading-edge and emerging I/O standards, the Cyclone device family includes embedded RAM blocks and other features to put FPGA technology in the hands of designers who develop volume-driven applications in the automotive, consumer, and computing markets. For more information about the Cyclone device family, visit  www.altera.com/cyclone.

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 www.altera.com.

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