Next month, Altera will release its Quartus 2 design software for Stratix V, the company’s 28nm FPGA family, said Danny Biran, senior vp of marketing at Altera, in a keynote address at the Globalpress Summit Conference in Santa Cruz yesterday.
"It allows people to start designing with Stratix V," said Biran, "when we introduce a product we make the design software available some months before." Stratix V is due to be introduced in Q1 2011.
Additionally, Altera has an early access programme for Stratix V. "The early access programme allows customers to get updates on capabilities", said Biran, "100s of customers are already on it."
Stratix V has forced Altera to innovate substantially to deal with the problems encountered by very advanced processes.
"Increasing bandwidth requires increasing performance but, while Moore’s Law is still in place, it is no longer as friendly to companies like us as it used to be," said Biran.
"When you go from one node to the next you pay a penalty in power consumption which the application cannot afford to pay so you have to find ways to shrink without exceeding the power budget," added Biran.
It is not just leakage that is the problem, but the inability to reduce the operating voltage. At 65nm, Altera introduced programmable power technology to address the problem. At 28nm, it is using a High K process and has introduced Hard Copy blocks, 28Gbit/sec transceivers and partial configuration to address the power budget constraints.
The company is also innovating round the problem of scaling FPGA DSP. "Today’s FPGA DSP technology does not scale", said Biran, "fixed precision DSP architecture cannot meet the increasing performance needs within the cost and power budgets, so, in Stratix V we’ve introduced a variable precision DSP. Every block on the FPGA can be tuned by the software to deliver the performance you need for that part of the system."
The technique delivers, said Biran, considerable savings in DSP resources depending on the particular application.
In video processing applications, variable precision uses only a third of the DSP resources compared to fixed precision DSP; in wireless basestations and military radar, it delivers a 50% reduction in DSP resources.
Asked by EW if using SOI might be helpful in addressing the company’s power budget constraints, Biran replied: "For the time being SOI is too expensive. We will not use it at 28nm nor at 20nm. But if the industry as a whole decides to use it, then the cost will come down. We’re not big enough to drive the development of a new process technology."