Cyclone IV FPGA Family: Lowest Cost, Lowest Power, Integrated Transceivers

Altera's Cyclone^® IV FPGA family extends the Cyclone FPGA series leadership in providing the market's lowest cost, lowest power FPGAs, now with a transceiver variant. Ideal for high-volume, cost-sensitive applications, Cyclone IV FPGAs enable you to meet increasing bandwidth requirements while lowering costs. The family includes:

• Cyclone IV GX FPGAs with up to eight integrated 3.125-Gbps transceivers
• Cyclone IV E FPGAs for a wide spectrum of general logic applications

Offering up to 150,000 logic elements (LEs), Cyclone IV FPGAs consume up to 30 percent less total power. They're ideal for low-cost, small form factor applications in:

• Automotive
• Broadcast
• Consumer
• Military BeMicro Software Defined Radio Kit: BeRadio Kit ^New! 
• Industrial
• Wireless
• Wireline

Lower Your System Costs

All Cyclone IV FPGAs require only two power supplies for operation, simplifying your power distribution network and saving you board costs, board space, and design time. For Cyclone IV GX FPGAs, the cost savings are further increased. With the introduction of integrated transceivers on the leading low-power Cyclone IV FPGA architecture, you get cost savings through simplified board design and integration. Furthermore, the flexibility of the transceiver clocking architecture allows you to implement multiple protocols while fully utilizing all available transceiver resources. The integration and flexibility of the Cyclone IV GX FPGA enables you to design in a smaller, lower cost device, lowering your total system costs.

Reduce Power Consumption

Built on an optimized 60-nm low-power process, Cyclone IV E FPGAs extend the low-power leadership of previous generation Cyclone III FPGAs. The latest generation devices reduce core voltage, which lowers total power by 25 percent compared to the predecessor. With Cyclone IV GX transceiver FPGAs, you can build a PCI Express to Gigabit Ethernet bridge for less than 1.5 watts.

Integrated Transceivers

Cyclone IV GX FPGAs are built with Altera's proven GX transceiver technology, known for excellent jitter performance and superior signal integrity. The PCI-SIG-compliant transceiver variant supports a wide variety of serial protocols. Cyclone IV GX FPGAs also feature the only hard intellectual property (IP) block for PCI Express x1, x2, and x4 in rootport and endpoint configurations.

Complete Design Resources

To assure a smooth, successful design flow, and to make it possible for you to turn your ideas into revenue quicker than ever before, Altera provides a complete Cyclone IV FPGA design environment including:

• Quartus^® II development software
• Library of proven IP
• Nios^® II, the world's most versatile embedded processor

Related Links

• Webcast: Reduce Total System Costs with Market's Lowest Cost, Lowest Power FPGAs
• White paper: Decrease Total System Costs with Industry's Lowest Cost, Lowest Power FPGAs (PDF)
• Cyclone IV FPGA Handbook (PDF)
• Cyclone IV FPGAs solution sheet (PDF)