Altera is a long-standing leader in the complex programmable logic device (CPLD) market. With over 10 000 CPLD users annually, more than 350 million units shipped worldwide, and $4 bn in cumulative sales, the company's MAX brand has been synonymous with CPLDs since the introduction of its MAX 5000 family in 1988. In March, Altera announced a 'new standard for the industry' with the launch of its MAX II family, which employs a radical new version of the CPLD architecture.
In stark contrast to traditional CPLDs, MAX II devices are built on a 0,18 μm embedded flash process based on a look-up table (LUT) architecture. Altera says that as a result, the new family is half the cost, one-tenth the power, four times the density, and twice the performance of its predecessor.
"Our customers are in search of an alternative to small and inflexible ASICs and ASSPs," said Erik Cleage, Altera's senior vice president of marketing. "This presented a giant opportunity to further the value proposition of CPLDs."
As a result of direct input from more than 500 customers around the globe, Altera set aggressive goals for the new MAX II family. Some of their expectations were obvious: the new chip had to be faster, smaller, lower cost, less power hungry, and much higher in density.
"What was not obvious was how to derive significant improvements from 15-year-old CPLD technology; the macrocell architecture is not scalable beyond 0,22 μm," said Cleage.
To meet the basic needs of today's CPLD users and to deliver the expanded CPLD feature set they required, Altera used a non-volatile, embedded flash process and adapted the LUT architecture from its highly successful FPGA families. As a result, the new devices are able to deliver twice the performance and quadruple the density at a tenth of the power consumption of previous MAX generations.
Software support for the MAX II family is included in the Quartus II design tool. Experienced MAX users will find the same, familiar user interface as MAX+PLUS II software, but will now have access to a broader range of silicon solutions - from CPLDs to FPGAs - all within the same environment.
First NVMe SSD Built with 8th-gen BiCS FLASH EBV Electrolink
Computer/Embedded Technology
KIOXIA recently announced the development and prototype demonstration of its new KIOXIA CM9 Series PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSDs, which incorporates CMOS directly Bonded to Array technology.
Read more...IMU with dual-sensing capability EBV Electrolink
Analogue, Mixed Signal, LSI
ST’s 6-axis inertial measurement unit integrates a dual accelerometer up to 320g and embedded AI for activity tracking and high-impact sensing.
Read more...Battery monitoring and balancing IC EBV Electrolink
Power Electronics / Power Management
The TLE9009DQU from Infineon is a multi-channel battery monitoring and balancing IC crafted for Li-Ion battery packs.
Read more...KIOXIA pioneer new 3D Flash technology EBV Electrolink
DSP, Micros & Memory
KIOXIA Corporation and Sandisk Corporation have pioneered a state-of-the-art 3D flash memory technology, setting the industry benchmark with a 4,8 Gb/s NAND interface speed, superior power efficiency, and heightened density.
Read more...Super-fast H.264 encoder FPGA core EBV Electrolink
DSP, Micros & Memory
An ITAR-compliant H.264 core designed for AMD FPGAs provides baseline H.264 support and is currently the smallest and fastest FPGA core in the industry.
Read more...Power IC supplies 1650 W EBV Electrolink
Power Electronics / Power Management
Power Integrations has announced a two-fold increase in power output from the HiperLCS-2 chipset with the new device now being able to deliver up to 1650 W of continuous output power.
Read more...Powering the intelligent edge EBV Electrolink
AI & ML
STMicroelectronics released new devices from the second generation of its industrial MPUs, the STM32MP2 series, to drive future progress in smart factories, smart healthcare, smart buildings, and smart infrastructure.
Read more...QLC Flash memory using BiCS tech EBV Electrolink
DSP, Micros & Memory
KIOXIA announced it had started shipping its 2 Tb Quad-Level-Cell memory devices with its 8th-generation BiCS FLASH 3D flash memory technology.
Read more...Integrated POL voltage regulators EBV Electrolink
Power Electronics / Power Management
Infineon’s TDA38807 and TDA38806 are their highest density high-efficiency integrated point-of-load (IPOL) solutions for smart enterprise systems.
printer friendly version