FROM
THE EDITOR
This week, Altera rolled out a brand new FPGA family called “Arria GX”. Arria GX is a low-cost FPGA with high-speed serial I/O supporting PCI Express, Gigabit Ethernet, and Serial RapidIO. Arria GX is now the second announced low-cost FPGA family with SerDes – further evidence that gigabit serial standards have moved from the exotic purview of the few into the mainstream in several application areas. Our latest feature has the details.
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Kevin Morris – Editor
FPGA and Structured ASIC Journal
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EVENTS & ANNOUNCEMENTS
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Serial Commodotization
Altera Arria GX
Anybody familiar with Altera FPGAs knows the GX designation. It’s the suffix that goes on when the family gets upgraded with high-speed serial transceivers. First we had Stratix, then Stratix GX. Next, at 90nm we got Stratix II and then Stratix II GX. Now the company has announced their 65nm lines. There’s Stratix III, now Cyclone III, and we’re waiting for the GX and… What’s this? Arria? 90nm again? Confused? We’ll sort it out for you.
Altera and archrival Xilinx have long played “Tag, You’re It” with innovations such as cost-optimized devices, low-power features, DSP accelerators, and high-speed serial transceivers. In each case, the company making the first move did so after carefully weighing the marketing consequences. In the case of differentiating the low-cost and high-performance FPGA families, this is a delicate dance. Each company wanted to keep the features in their low-cost family as light as possible – both to optimize cost/margin and to preserve differentiation (and thus avoid cannibalization) of their more expensive high-end device families.
This balance worked great as long as both companies had the same stakes with making money from their low-cost families and protecting their more traditional high-end offerings. Unfortunately, a spoiler has entered the ring – in the form of Lattice Semiconductor. Lattice has no giant business to protect in high-end FPGAs. They have only recently entered the high-end derby in a serious way. As a result, Lattice is now making moves that upset the equilibrium. We have seen Lattice’s full-blown DSP blocks in their low-cost lines almost certainly elicit responses from their larger competitors. Recently, Xilinx launched a non-volatile FPGA family constructed of a Spartan-3 device die-stacked with a flash configuration memory – almost certainly in response to Lattice’s success with their LatticeXP family.
Recently, Lattice introduced their new Lattice ECP2M family – busting the trend by including high-speed serial I/O (long considered exclusively a high-end FPGA feature) in a cost-optimized FPGA family. Now, Altera is apparently the first to respond to this challenge with their announcement of the new Arria GX family. Arria is certainly more than a check-in-the-box “yes, we’ve got low-cost SerDes too” offering, however. Altera has clearly put some thought into creating a new, market-viable family that goes after specific, emerging, high-value application areas. [more]
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