Altera has released the Stratix IV GX Edition of its Transceiver Signal Integrity Development Kit.

This full-featured hardware development platform has an Altera Stratix IV GX FPGA with transceivers that operate up to 8.5 Gbps, allowing engineers to prototype and test their high-speed interfaces quickly and easily.

Designers can use the kit to test drive Altera's 40-nm Stratix IV GX FPGA under their specific design system requirements.

Signal integrity is a critical design requirement for bandwidth-intensive applications such as digital video and 4G wireless.

Altera's FPGAs have good signal integrity, and this kit allows users to evaluate transceiver performance for jitter, protocol compliance, and equalisation at up to 8.5 Gbps through a simple-to-use graphical user interface (GUI).

The Transceiver Signal Integrity Development Kit, Stratix IV GX Edition includes a Stratix IV GX development board, with EP4SGX230KF40C3N or EP4SGX230KF40C2N on-board FPGAs, eight transceiver channels routed to SMA connectors, flash memory for storing FPGA images and embedded USB-Blaster for FPGA configuration and control.

The Application GUI allows users to change transceiver settings and data patterns, displays bit error rates for each transceiver channel and displays temperature and power-consumption information.

The Transceiver Signal Integrity Development Kit, Stratix IV GX Edition costs $2,495 for the 4SGX230N/C3 kit and $2,995 for the 4SGX230N/C2 kit.

More information: www.altera.com/pr/sikit