Market trends, the need for increased productivity, and new legislation have accelerated the use of safety systems in industrial machinery. This TÜV-qualified FPGA design methodology is changing the paradigms of safety designs and will greatly reduce development effort, system complexity, and time to market. This allows FPGA users to design their own customized safety controllers and provides a significant competitive advantage over traditional microcontroller or ASIC-based designs.

Read More → "Developing Functional Safety Systems with TÜV-Qualified FPGAs"

Approximately one-third of embedded designers surveyed on the adoption and use of FPGAs for embedded applications responded that they perceived FPGAs as too expensive to use in their designs. However, a look at the total cost of ownership (TCO) at the system level (as measured by development, enhancement, replacement, and maintenance costs over the lifetime of the product) reveals that Altera FPGAs offer competitive and flexible alternatives to discrete MCU/DSP/ASSP products.

< … Read More → "Lowering The Total Cost of Ownership for Industrial Applications"

Need high bandwidth for your next-generation design? Watch our 9-minute video to see 25 Gbps transceiver performance on a 28nm device.

You will:

• See a live demo of our 28nm transceiver technology running a pseudo-random bitpattern at 25 Gbps
• See transmit and receive eye diagrams across … Read More → "Achieving 25 Gbps Transceiver Performance on 28nm FPGAs"

This paper will enumerate the benefits of a platform-based system design approach.  The original electronic design process built by linking tools together has remained largely unchanged for decades. Companies doing electronics design continue to design products by cobbling together a collection of tools to create what is commonly referred to as the “tool-chain”. Many of these tools … Read More → "Next Generation System Design – Platforms versus Tool-Chains"

To support the accelerating image format conversion to FPGAs, Altera has developed a 1080p video design framework, described in this white paper, that makes it easy for system designers to develop a custom image format conversion signal chain. The image format conversion reference design discussed can be used as a starting point and modified to develop custom video processing applications. … Read More → "Enabling Improved Image Format Conversion with FPGAs"

Designing video equipment for streaming multiple uncompressed video signals is a new challenge, especially with the demand for high-definition video streams. This white paper examines how a multichannel streaming PCIe … Read More → "Streaming Multichannel Uncompressed Video in the Broadcast Environment"

Traditionally, portable system designers have used ASICs and ASSPs to implement memory interfaces, I/O expansion, power-on sequencing, discrete logic functions, display, and other functions. Cost limitations, power and cooling restrictions, and board space requirements often limit the use of PLDs in these applications. Today, however, innovations in CPLDs in power reduction, cost optimization, and small form-factor packaging allow PLDs … Read More → "Reduce Total System Cost in Portable Applications Using MAX II CPLDs"

In addition to processing techniques, FPGA innovations allow Altera to move beyond Moore’s Law to meet higher bandwidth requirements while meeting cost and power budgets. Altera’s Stratix V FPGAs provide breakthrough bandwidth via 28-Gbps power-efficient transceivers, and allow users to integrate more of their design on a single FPGA by using Embedded HardCopy Blocks while increasing flexibility through partial reconfiguration.