Altera is shipping its first 40nm Stratix IV FPGAs.

The first device available is the EP4SGX230, with 230,000K logic elements (LEs), 36 transceivers operating up to 8.5Gbit/s, 17Mbits of Ram and 1,288 embedded multipliers.

There are two variants, an enhanced (E) version and transceiver-based (GX) version. The family will offer up to 680,000 LEs, support for DDR3 memory at 1.067Gbit/s, and up to four hard intellectual property cores for PCIe Gen1 and Gen2 (x1, x4 and x8).

Programmable power technology enables every programmable logic array block, DSP block, and memory block to deliver high speed or low power.

Other family variants are scheduled to ship in 2009.

More information: www.altera.com