Cyclone III
Cool, Cheap, and Powerful

Power, Price, and Performance – in the old days, every new click of Moore’s law gave us all three, automatically.  Shrink the gates and you can fit more of ‘em in the same space, they switch faster, and you can drop your supply voltage, saving power.  As we passed down into double-digit nanometers, however, we started having to compromise more.  Now, we have to pick just two out of the three “Ps” of Moore’s Law.

Altera is perfectly content with that state of affairs, as they have just launched their new Cyclone III low-cost FPGA family – the first low-cost FPGA at the 65nm process node.  They’ve chosen the “Power” and “Price” Ps from the menu, and packed as much functionality as they can onto the new, cost-optimized family.  The density range for Cyclone III covers new turf for low-cost FPGAs, and the power consumption is even lower for a given amount of logic than the company’s high-end 65nm Stratix III family.

The battle for low-cost FPGA supremacy has been heating up steadily for the past two or three years.  The number and diversity of entrants in this category is far larger than in any other segment in programmable logic.  Altera, Xilinx, Lattice, Actel, and QuickLogic all offer devices that could be categorized as low-cost FPGA.  Several of them offer multiple families.  There are volatile (SRAM) devices, non-volatile (antifuse and flash) devices, and hybrid (SRAM with built-in configuration flash) devices.  Cyclone III falls into the first category (volatile SRAM FPGAs) along with Xilinx’s Spartan-3 family and Lattice’s ECP2 family.

Both the Xilinx and Lattice low-cost families are still at the 90nm node, along with Altera’s previous-generation Cyclone II.  What does 65nm bring to low-cost FPGA?  You’ll get higher density (or lower cost for the same density) and lower power operation as the primary benefits. [more]