Altera is offering a development board and software for its Arria II GX FPGAs.

The development kit comes with a development board featuring an Arria II GX (EP2AGX125EF35) FPGA with twelve transceivers, a one-year licence for Quartus II Design Software, Development Kit Edition and access to Altera's MegaCore IP library including the Nios II Embedded Design Suite.

It provides pre-verified components and supporting hardware reference designs.

For example, the development kit offers an entire PCI Express (PCIe) Gen1 end-point design package, featuring a PCI-SIG-compliant Arria II GX FPGA-based development board with an embedded PCIe Gen1 hard intellectual property core.

There are also design resources available on Altera website, including free PCIe training, PCIe, Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) and SDI-based reference designs to help designers get up-to-speed quickly, and a database of over 20 readily available mezzanine cards to address specific application and market needs.

Arria II GX FPGAs support up to sixteen 3.75Gbit/s transceivers, 256k logic elements and 8.5Mbit of internal RAM.

The FPGAs are targeted for applications using mainstream transceiver protocols including PCIe, GbE, triple-speed SDI, CPRI, GPON, and XAUI.