Altera continues with its embedded initiative in announcing six FPGA SoCs based on ARM's Cortex-A9 MPCore processor. In the second half of next year, silicon will be available for the SoCs based on the dual-core processor, integrating 28nm Cyclone V or Arria V FPGA fabric, ECC, protected memory controllers, peripherals and a minimum bandwidth interconnect of 125Gbit/s. The SoCs are targeted at industrial drives; power applications, such as in solar inverters and the smart grid; HD video processing, for example, driver assist systems, automotive infotainment, video surveillance, video conferencing and broadcast; and outside, wireless networks where high bandwidth and industrial operating temperatures are required. The 800MHZ ARM processor is combined with a NEON media processing engine, single or double precision FPU, L1 and L2 caches, ECC-protected memory controllers, ECC-protected scratchpad memory and peripherals that include USB 2.0 and OTG, timers, watchdog timers and timers. There will be four Cyclone V devices, with 25, 40, 85 and 110k LE (look up elements) and two Arria V SoC FPGAs with 350 and 460k LEs. The company is also reflecting the trend towards virtual prototyping with the immediate release of Virtual Target, a PC-based simulation prototyping, based on Synopsys's virtual prototyping.
