Altera unveils Plug and Play signal integrity technology

Bangalore

September 18th, 2007

Altera Corporation has announced the launch of its Plug and Play signal
integrity technology that is enabled by the latest Quartus II design software
and available now in production Stratix II GX FPGAs. Plug and Play signal
integrity enables a single card configuration to be plugged into any designated
system slot while under system power.

"Altera continues to deliver FPGA transceiver innovation to customers by
providing system designers with a plug-and-play signal integrity capability
available in an FPGA," said Louie Leung, marketing director at Altera.
"Our FPGAs' ability to plug into a powered system and automatically adjust
to varying system and environmental conditions allows our customers to reduce
inventories, simplify maintenance procedures and shorten time to market. The
ADCE itself significantly reduces the tedious characterization effort that is
the result of high-speed systems having varying link characteristics across card
slots."

Plug and Play signal integrity technology provides designers and system
architects with Stratix II GX FPGAs that now can actively monitor and
automatically compensate for signal degradation in multi-gigabit system
interconnects due to manufacturing, voltage, temperature, and design variations.
Altera's Plug and Play signal Integrity solution continuously adjusts equalizer
settings for each of up to 20 receivers found in the Stratix II GX FPGA family
to provide the best eye opening for non-return-to-zero (NRZ) signals operating
between 2.5 Gbps and 6.375 Gbps, significantly improving system reliability,
performance, and bit error rate (BER).

Plug and Play signal Integrity can be enabled with the customer beta release
of Quartus II software version 7.2, which can be obtained from Altera's local
sales representatives. The production version of Quartus II software will be
available for download next month.