London, United Kingdom, February 11, 2010 –  NXP Semiconductors has announced that its CGV™ series of JESD204A-compliant data converters are now interoperable with Altera Corporation’s Stratix IV GX and Arria II GX FPGA families, and will also be interoperable in the future with the Cyclone IV GX FPGA family. Assured interoperability and interworking between programmable logic devices and high-speed converters is a critical acceptance criterion for equipment designers, because it eliminates risk and cost associated with project schedules. 

The new JESD204A-compliant converters from NXP are suitable for cellular base stations and other wireless communication infrastructure equipment, as well as medical, instrumentation and military/aerospace applications. NXP offers ADC and DAC evaluation boards that include the Altera HSMC interface for easy connection to Altera FPGA evaluation boards allowing rapid demonstration of device interoperability. The NXP and Altera evaluation boards are available to qualified OEMs worldwide. NXP’s JESD204A ADC evaluation board based on the ADC1413D will be previewed during the Mobile World Congress 2010 show in Barcelona, Spain, February 15-18.

“NXP Semiconductors is pleased to extend this assured interoperability to our CGV customers, many of whom are interested in using the latest Altera FPGAs in their system designs”, said Maury Wood, senior director and product line manager, high speed converters, NXP Semiconductors. “With the proven interoperability of companion JESD204A IP blocks available from Altera, manufacturers can get to market quickly and cost effectively with the supply chain benefits of industry-standard architectures”. 

“Altera is looking forward to participating in equipment design developments with NXP’s CGV data converters, where the design engineer will be assured of seamless interoperability with our industry-leading FPGA families including Stratix IV GX, Arria II GX and Cyclone IV GX with integrated transceivers”, said Arun Iyengar, senior director of Altera’s communications and broadcast business units. “This combination of NXP’s JESD204A-compliant data converters and Altera’s FPGAs will provide designers of wireless base stations and remote radio heads a high degree of flexibility and scalability, while enabling ease-of-use and cost reduction”.

CGV™ (Convertisseur Grande Vitesse) designates NXP’s compliant, superset implementation of the JEDEC JESD204A interface standard, with enhanced rate (4.0 Gbps typical), enhanced reach (100 cm typical), enhanced features (multiple DAC synchronization) and assured FPGA interoperability. 

Specifically, NXP offers enhancements in terms of transceiver rate (up to 4.0 Gbps versus the standard rate of 3.125 Gbps, a 28% increase), and transmitter reach (up to 100 cm versus the standard reach of 20 cm, a 400% increase). The enhanced CGV features include Multi Device Synchronization (MDS) for the DAC1408D series of D/A Converters, which is not specified, but informatively discussed in the JEDEC specification.  NXP has implemented this optional feature to enable LTE MIMO base station and other advanced multi-channel applications. NXP’s implementation of MDS enables up to sixteen DACs data streams to be sample synchronized and phase coherent.

Altera FPGAs

• The 40-nm Stratix IV GX FPGA family offers the industry’s most advanced FPGAs with unprecedented densities, performance, and system bandwidth, all at the lowest power for high-end FPGAs. Targeting customers in a variety of markets, including communications, broadcast, test, medical and military, Stratix IV GX FPGAs enables designers to achieve new levels of integration and innovation.
• The 40-nm Arria II GX FPGA family with integrated transceivers, are the ideal devices for 3-Gbps transceiver applications requiring low-cost FPGAs with high-end capabilities. They offer 25% higher performance, up to 50% lower price and up to 50% lower power, compared to competitive high-end FPGAs. Arria II GX FPGAs are targeted for applications using mainstream protocols such as CPRI, PCIe and GbE.
• The Cyclone IV GX FPGA family with integrated transceivers provides the market’s lowest cost, lowest power FPGAs. Ideal for high-volume, cost-sensitive applications, Cyclone IV GX FPGAs enable system designers to respond to increased low-cost bandwidth needs driven by the demand for mobile video, voice, and data access, and the hunger for high-quality 3D images.

Availability

NXP CGV evaluation boards are available to qualified OEMs worldwide. For more information about NXP’s data converters, please visit:http://www.nxp.com/products/data_converters/index.html#preview

ACTON, MASS. and SHANGHAI, CHINA — February 11, 2010 — Carbon Design Systems^TM, the leading supplier of tools for the automatic creation, validation and deployment of system-level models, and VeriSilicon announced today that they have partnered to integrate VeriSilicon’s ZSP® models into the Carbon SoC Designer virtual platform.

Processors from VeriSilicon, a silicon solutions company based in China, are fully integrated with SoC (system on chip) Designer and enable users to perform implementation-accurate architectural analysis and pre-silicon firmware development.

Fast, Accurate Firmware Development

“We are happy to support VeriSilicon’s ZSP Digital Signal Processor cores and have VeriSilicon join our growing portfolio of IP partners,” states Bill Neifert, Carbon’s vice president of Business Development. “The majority of companies developing complex SoC designs are using our SoC Designer virtual platform. This partnership will enable those companies to design with VeriSilicon’s ZSP processors and begin firmware development well in advance of actual silicon.”

“VeriSilicon is committed to simplifying the steps needed to adopt our ZSP processors,” adds Prasad Kalluri, VeriSilicon’s corporate vice president of Engineering. “SoC designs are getting increasingly complex and system developers benefit by using a system-level modeling framework like Carbon’s SoC Designer virtual platform. Partnering with Carbon to make our ZSP Digital Signal Processor cores available in SoC Designer enables our customers to start the firmware development process much earlier in the design cycle and debug with full system visibility.”

The Integration

This integration links software models for the ZSP5XX and ZSP8XX series processors and debuggers directly into the SoC Designer virtual platform environment. Integrated models can take advantage of all of SoC Designer’s system analysis and debug capabilities. Debug of hardware and software is synchronized to enable engineers to set breakpoints in any part of the system and immediately see the impact of hardware or software changes on the entire system.

Availability

The VeriSilicon ZSP integration is available now from Carbon Design Systems. For pricing and further details, send email to: info@carbondesignsystems.com. To learn more about Carbon Design Systems, visit: www.carbondesignsystems.com.

About VeriSilicon

Founded in 2001, VeriSilicon Holdings Co., Ltd. (“VeriSilicon”) is a fast-growing IC (integrated circuit) design foundry providing custom solutions and SoC turnkey services. It has an extensive track record of accelerating customer designs from initial specification to silicon, achieving first silicon success on time and on spec. A licensable digital signal processing (ZSP®) cores and star IP-based SoC platforms, along with value-added mixed signal IP portfolio, are key differentiators for VeriSilicon’s success in a broad range of application markets. VeriSilicon has research and development centers in Santa Clara, Calif., and Dallas; Shanghai and Beijing, China; and sales and customer support offices in Santa Clara; Shanghai, Beijing and Shenzhen, China; Tokyo, Japan; Taipei, Taiwan; Nice, France; and Seoul, Korea. For more information, visit www.verisilicon.com.

About Carbon Design Systems

Carbon Design Systems offers the leading system validation solution for complex system-on-chip (SoC) designs. Target applications range from model generation and deployment to virtual platform creation, execution, and analysis. Carbon provides 100% implementation accuracy on the critical components required for accurate architectural analysis and pre-silicon hardware/software validation. Solutions are based on open industry standards, including SystemC, IP-XACT, Verilog, VHDL, OSCI TLM, MDI, SCML, CASI, CADI and CAPI. Carbon’s customers are systems, semiconductor, and IP companies that focus on wireless, networking and consumer electronics. Carbon is headquartered at 125 Nagog Park, Acton, Mass., 01720. Telephone: (978) 264-7300. Facsimile: (978) 264-9990. Email: info@carbondesignsystems.com. Website: www.carbondesignsystems.com.