Altera is a long-standing leader in the complex programmable logic device (CPLD) market. With over 10 000 CPLD users annually, more than 350 million units shipped worldwide, and $4 bn in cumulative sales, the company's MAX brand has been synonymous with CPLDs since the introduction of its MAX 5000 family in 1988. In March, Altera announced a 'new standard for the industry' with the launch of its MAX II family, which employs a radical new version of the CPLD architecture.
In stark contrast to traditional CPLDs, MAX II devices are built on a 0,18 μm embedded flash process based on a look-up table (LUT) architecture. Altera says that as a result, the new family is half the cost, one-tenth the power, four times the density, and twice the performance of its predecessor.
"Our customers are in search of an alternative to small and inflexible ASICs and ASSPs," said Erik Cleage, Altera's senior vice president of marketing. "This presented a giant opportunity to further the value proposition of CPLDs."
As a result of direct input from more than 500 customers around the globe, Altera set aggressive goals for the new MAX II family. Some of their expectations were obvious: the new chip had to be faster, smaller, lower cost, less power hungry, and much higher in density.
"What was not obvious was how to derive significant improvements from 15-year-old CPLD technology; the macrocell architecture is not scalable beyond 0,22 μm," said Cleage.
To meet the basic needs of today's CPLD users and to deliver the expanded CPLD feature set they required, Altera used a non-volatile, embedded flash process and adapted the LUT architecture from its highly successful FPGA families. As a result, the new devices are able to deliver twice the performance and quadruple the density at a tenth of the power consumption of previous MAX generations.
Software support for the MAX II family is included in the Quartus II design tool. Experienced MAX users will find the same, familiar user interface as MAX+PLUS II software, but will now have access to a broader range of silicon solutions - from CPLDs to FPGAs - all within the same environment.
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