Introduction to Altera Cyclone IV GX FPGA

Altera's Cyclone IV series FPGA includes two series: Cyclone IV E and Cyclone IV GX, with low-cost, low-power FPGA architecture, 6 K to 150 K logic cells, up to 6.3 Mb of embedded memory, less than 1.5 W total power consumption; Cyclone IV GX devices provide up to eight 3.125 Gbps high-speed transceivers for high-volume, cost-sensitive applications such as wireless, wireline, broadcasting, industrial, user, and communications industries. This article mainly introduces Cyclone IV GX FPGA.

Altera's new Cyclone® IV series FPGA devices consolidate the Cyclone series' leading position in the low-cost, low-power FPGA market, and currently provide models with integrated transceiver functions. Cyclone IV devices are designed for high-volume, cost-sensitive applications, enabling system designers to reduce costs while meeting ever-increasing bandwidth requirements.

Before understanding Cyclone IV GX FPGA, let's take a look at the following 10 parts.

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The Cyclone IV device family is based on an optimized low-power process and offers the following two models:

■ Cyclone IV E—The lowest power consumption, achieving higher functionality at the lowest cost

■ Cyclone IV GX—The lowest power consumption, the lowest cost FPGA that integrates 3.125 Gbps transceivers

Cyclone IV devices integrate an optional low-cost transceiver, which saves power and cost without compromising performance. Cyclone IV devices are undoubtedly the most ideal choice for low-cost and small-scale applications in wireless, wired, broadcast, industrial, user, and communications industries.

Altera Cyclone IV GX FPGA Development Kit

The Altera® Cyclone® IV GX FPGA development kit provides a comprehensive, best-in-class design environment for quickly starting to develop low-cost, low-power FPGA system-level designs. The kit helps you shorten the product development cycle, enabling you to bring your products to the market more quickly, and set new product milestones. With this platform, you can:

1、Use Cyclone IV GX PCI Express hard intellectual property (IP) and PCI-SIG® compatible circuit boards to develop and test PCI Express® Gen1 x1, x2, and x4 endpoint designs.

2、Using onboard DDR2 memory, through its expansion function, high-speed intermediate link card (HSMC) connector, develop and test multi-channel protocol bridge design. Altera partners provide more than 30 different HSMCs, as well as support protocols such as CPRI, SATA, and SDI.

3、Reuse the example design provided by the kit board test system to speed up your FPGA design.

For the low-cost and low-power circuit boards of your product, use the motherboard of the kit as a design model.

That's all about Altera Cyclone IV GX FPGA. For more information about well-known FPGA manufacturers, please click here.