Altera has made its biggest move into the system-on-chip (SoC) market with its latest range of ARM Cortex processor-based FPGAs. These will be 28nm chips incorporating either Cyclone V or Arria V FPGA fabrics with a dual-core Cortex-A9 MPCore processor. First silicon is expected in the second half of next year.
“For us this is a new classification of device which is distinct from our traditional FPGAs,” said Chris Balough, senior director of product marketing at Altera.
The Cyclone V and Arria V SoC FPGAs feature a processor sub-system with a dual-core 800MHz Cortex-A9 MPCore processor, NEON media processing engine, single/double-precision floating point unit, L1 and L2 caches, ECC-protected memory controllers, error correcting code protected scratchpad memory and a standard range of peripherals. “Dual-core is the sweet-spot for A9 configurations,” said Balough
The processor system can deliver 4,000 DMIPS peak performance for less than 1.8W. Both the processor and FPGA fabric are powered independently and can be configured and booted in any order. Once in operation, the FPGA portion can be powered down as needed to save power.
See also: The Programmable Solutions Zone
The Cortex-A9 MPCore processor system and FPGA are interconnected by high speed data paths, providing over 125Gbit/s peak bandwidth with integrated data coherency. “This level of performance would not be possible with a two-chip design,” said Balough.
Likely applications for the Cyclone V SoC FPGAs could be multiple motor drive systems and video processing. They have 5Gbit/s I/O transceivers and up to 110K logic elements (LEs). Arria V SoC FPGAs feature 10Gibit/s transceivers and up to 460K LEs and will be aimed at high-end applications such as LTE 4G mobile basestations. Altera is offering a virtual prototyping platform for the SoC FPGAs, which is based on Synopsys software tools.
Balough says designers are moving toward software, rather than traditional (FPGA) hardware-based prototyping for the speed and flexibility it can offer. Altera will offer the option for an FPGA-in-the-loop extension later in the year. By offering an off-the-shelf prototyping platform with virtual target supporting Linux and VxWorks the company hopes to demystify FPGAs design for a broader range of embedded system design.
The more specialist aspects of FPGA design are already simplified with the Qsys integration tool which generates FPGA-optimised-interconnects.