At its annual Innovators Day developer conference, Altera announced investments around its FPGA hardware and software portfolio for a range of applications, including industrial, vision, defense, aerospace, communications, and data center. These include the production availability of its Agilex FPGA and SoC FPGA device families and enhanced features to meet growing requirements for edge AI and wireless applications. The company also launched its new Visual Designer Studio tool in Quartus Prime Software version 25.3.
Altera recently re-established itself as an independent company, and the largest pure-play FPGA company, after Intel sold a majority stake in the company to private equity group Silver Lake earlier this year. The new product roadmap focuses on embedded, aerospace and defense, audio/video, and emerging markets such as robotics, drones, and edge AI.
(Source: Altera)
Altera announced production availability of all Agilex FPGA families, including Agilex 5 and Agilex 3 SoC FPGAs, which feature an integrated Arm processor subsystem. The power- and cost-optimized SoC FPGAs target FPGA-based edge AI use cases as well as traditional hardware-software co-processing applications that require deterministic low-latency performance, system integration, and power efficiency.
Altera also announced several feature enhancements for the Agilex 5 D-Series FPGAs and SoCs, targeting applications such as edge AI inference, 4K/8K video, and 5G/6G wireless radio use cases, which require higher performance, capacity, and greater memory throughput, along with new post-quantum cryptography (PQC) secure boot capability.
The mid-range Agilex 5 D-Series FPGAs and SoCs offer increased density by up to 2.5× with the highest-density FPGAs featuring up to 1.6 million logic elements in a single device. The DDR interface speeds are also increased up to 5,600 MT/s and LPDDR5 up to 5,500 MT/s per interface instance for all Agilex 5 D-Series FPGAs, which is a 25% increase compared to prior specifications.
Developers can start designing now using select Agilex 5 D-Series devices in Quartus Prime Software. Altera announced the release of its Quartus Prime Software version 25.3, offering early access to new design tools. Version 25.3 is available for download now, along with the latest release of Altera’s FPGA AI Suite version 25.3, which accelerates the integration of AI models into an FPGA.
This latest Quartus Prime Software release includes early access to Visual Designer Studio, Altera’s 4th-generation system integration tool that automates the process of connecting IP blocks in the design flow. The Visual Designer Studio can reduce the time it takes to get started on an FPGA design from five days to two hours when compared to RTL only, according to Altera.
In addition, the latest release achieves a six percent improvement in compile times compared to version 25.1.1, extending the overall compile time reduction to 27 percent since Agilex 7 FPGAs entered production (version 23.1). Designs also use an average of six percent fewer adaptive logic modules, while maintaining high Fmax performance (version 25.1.1), according to the company.
Developers also have access to more than 300 registered partners in the Altera Solution Acceleration Partner (ASAP) Program. Partners provide IP, software, hardware, and design services.
The post Altera expands FPGA portfolio appeared first on Electronic Products.
