Cyclone Devices—Industry's Lowest-Cost FPGA Family—Shipping Ahead of Schedule

Altera EP1C3 EP1C6 EP1C12 EP1C20

Altera Ships Two Members of Cyclone Device Family, Reflecting Maturity of Process

Altera Corporation announced that the first two CycloneTM device family members, the EP1C20 and EP1C6, are now shipping to customers several weeks ahead of schedule. Originally slated to ship in the first quarter of 2003, both devices began shipping in December as engineering samples, with production device availability targeted for March. As the industry's lowest-cost FPGAs, the Cyclone device family is providing designers of high-volume systems with all the benefits of a programmable logic solution at ASIC prices.

Thanks to the maturity of the 0.13-micron, all-copper production process with foundry partner TSMC, Altera plans to ship more than 25,000 Cyclone devices to distributors within the first quarter. Altera is currently working on more than 500 design engagements among the accounts being tracked, and many more among its broad base of customers.

Cyclone devices, priced as low as $1.50 per 1,000 logic elements (LEs) in volume quantities, now offer price points on par with ASICs without the NRE (non-recurring engineering) charges and without the extended development period. Cyclone devices are a compelling alternative to ASICs for consumer, automotive, industrial, and other high-volume, cost-sensitive applications.

Pricing and Availability

Engineering samples of the EP1C6 and EP1C20 are available today with production device availability scheduled for late March. The EP1C3 and EP1C12 members of the Cyclone device family are scheduled to go straight to production by the second quarter. Thanks to Altera's vertical migration strategy, designers can lay out their boards for any of the Cyclone devices and use the EP1C20 and EP1C6 devices until the EP1C3 or EP1C12 devices are available. With Quartus® II design software support available since September and the successful rollout of the first Cyclone devices, system designers can now ramp their volume applications today using the lowest-cost FPGA products available on the market today. Cyclone device pricing ranges from $4 to $40 per unit for high volumes of the EP1C3 and EP1C20, respectively.

About the Cyclone Device Family

Cyclone devices are the industry's lowest-cost FPGAs. With densities ranging from 2,910 to 20,060 logic elements, Cyclone devices feature up to 288 Kbits of embedded memory and are based on a 1.5-V, all-layer-copper SRAM process. Cyclone devices offer up to two phase-locked loops (PLLs) per device and a hierarchical clocking structure for extensive on- and off-chip clock management. Each device supports a variety of single-ended I/O standards such as LVTTL, LVCMOS, PCI, and SSTL-2/3 and differential I/O technology supporting LVDS signaling for data rates up to 311 Mbps. Cyclone devices have dedicated circuitry to interface with high-performance external single data rate (SDR) SDRAM and double data rate (DDR) SDRAM and FCRAM memory devices.

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