Altera Mediates the I/O Standards War With New Open Interface.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 16, 2001

Altera Corporation (Nasdaq:ALTR) today stepped in as a mediator in the communications industry's fierce I/O standards war with the immediate availability of its Atlantic(TM) interface, the first interface of its kind that allows designers a simple and efficient way to gracefully bridge between devices with incompatible interfaces.

"With ASSP vendors adopting a myriad of different standards for chip-to-chip, as well as board-to-board communications, there's a need for a `translator' to allow different devices to talk to each other," said Craig Lytle, vice president of Altera's intellectual property business unit. "Our Atlantic interface is the glue for functional blocks in a communications system."

System OEMs are using intellectual property functions today on programmable logic to translate between these different ASSP interfaces. To enable users to easily design these bridges between different IP functions, Altera developed the Atlantic interface, an on-chip data path bus scalable for all communication applications from 155Mb/s to over 40Gb/s.

Previously, for example, a programmable logic device (PLD) design bridging a framer with a Flexbus interface to a network processor with POS-PHY could take up to four weeks to develop even with the IP functions available. Using IP functions with Atlantic, the POS-PHY and Flexbus IP functions in the PLD would simply plug together.

The Atlantic interface is part of Altera's strategy to provide system-on-a-programmable-chip (SOPC) solutions that bring together integrated communications solutions. To this end, Altera plans to host on Aug. 7 its High-Speed I/O Conference, a forum that will bring together standard committee chairs, industry leaders and engineers to discuss the challenges of integrating these new and emerging standards.

"Altera has always been an enabler of leading edge telecom designs," said Glenn Henshaw, director of Altera's Ottawa Technology Centre that contributed to the development of the Atlantic standard. "The fact that Altera has published a common interface standard for packet and cell based IP cores allows designers to quickly get up to speed and complete their design."

The IP community is hungry for standardization and has reacted favorably to the Atlantic interface. The Atlantic functional specification is an open standard available on the Altera web site and is supported by the Altera Megafunction Partners Program (AMPP(SM)).

Technical Details

Defined with minimal overhead, Atlantic utilizes approximately 10 control signals in addition to a variable width data bus, and an optional address bus. The control signals include parity, start-of-packet, end-of-packet, error, empty, enable or data valid or data available signals. The Atlantic interface's unidirectional bus structure allows cutting edge performance whilst maintaining efficiency in a programmable logic architecture.

Like all MegaCores(R) offered by Altera, designers can take a "free test drive" through the Quartus(R) II and MAX+PLUS(R) development software OpenCore(R) evaluation feature. This allows designers to quickly verify the functionality of an IP core before purchasing.

About Altera

Altera Corporation, The Programmable Solutions Company(R), was founded in 1983 and is a leading supplier of programmable logic devices (PLDs). Altera's CMOS-based PLDs are user-programmable semiconductor chips that enhance flexibility and reduce time-to-market for companies in the communications, computer peripheral, and industrial markets. By using high performance devices, software development tools, and sophisticated intellectual property cores, system-on-a-programmable-chip (SOPC) solutions can be created with embedded processors, memory, and other complex logic together on a single PLD. Altera common stock is traded on The Nasdaq Stock Market under the symbol ALTR. More information on Altera is available on the Internet at http://www.altera.com.

Note to Editors: Altera, The Programmable Solutions Company, the stylized Altera logo, specific device designations and all other words that are identified as trademarks and/or service marks are, unless noted otherwise, the trademarks and service marks of Altera Corporation in the U.S. and other countries. All other product or service names are the property of their respective holders.