Altera Ships Industry's Highest Density Transceiver FPGAs.

Shipment Marks Latest Milestone in the Successful Rollout of Stratix IV FPGA Family

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Altera Corporation (NASDAQ:ALTR) today announced silicon availability of the industry's highest density transceiver FPGA. As the second member of the Altera([R]) Stratix([R]) IV GX FPGA family to ship, the EP4SGX530 is 60 percent larger than the largest transceiver FPGA on the market. The device offers 530K logic elements (LEs), up to 48 transceivers operating at up to 8.5 Gbps, 20.3 Mbits of RAM and 1,040 embedded multipliers. Stratix IV GX devices target numerous applications in the communications, broadcast, test, medical and military markets.

"Agilent is committed to providing test equipment that accelerates the turn-on and debug phase of emerging high-speed interconnects," said Jun Chie, marketing manager for Agilent's logic and protocol test tools. "The high performance of the Altera Stratix IV FPGA and its availability today is playing an important role in Agilent's ability to continue meeting its commitment to industry leaders."

Stratix IV GX FPGAs incorporate up to four hard intellectual property (IP) cores for PCI Express Gen1 and Gen2 (x1, x4 and x8), and also support a wide range of protocols including Serial RapidIO([R]), 40G/100G Ethernet, XAUI, CPRI (including 6G CPRI), CEI-6G, GPON, SFI-5.1 and Interlaken. For more information on the market-leading features within Altera Stratix IV FPGAs, visit www.altera.com/pr/stratix4.

"In the communications infrastructure market, it is critical to deliver innovative solutions quickly to comply with the latest standards," said Thomas Rasmussen, vice president, product line management, TPACK. "The flexibility, low power consumption and extensive serial interface support of Altera's Stratix IV GX FPGAs enabled us to rapidly develop and deliver the TPX4004, the industry's first 40-nm carrier Ethernet switch."

"The market is hungry for a solution that delivers more bandwidth and lower power consumption," said Luanne Schirrmeister, Altera Corporation's senior director, component product marketing. "The strong response we've seen from customers prove the Stratix IV GX devices offer the right combination of data rate, power consumption, bandwidth and data processing capabilities required for next-generation applications, such as video over IP, 4G wireless and digital TV."

Stratix IV GX FPGA Availability

The Stratix IV GX EP4SGX530 and EP4SGX230 devices are currently shipping, with other family members scheduled to ship in 2009. For more information on Stratix IV FPGAs, visit www.altera.com/pr/stratix4.

About Altera

Altera programmable solutions enable system and semiconductor companies to rapidly and cost effectively innovate, differentiate and win in their markets. Find out more at www.altera.com. To subscribe to Altera's RSS/XML news feeds, visit Altera RSS Feeds.

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This release contains a "forward-looking statement" regarding anticipated device shipments in 2009 that are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Investors are cautioned that all forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainty, including without limitation the risk that future performance is dependent on product development schedules, the design performance of software and other tools, as well as the company's and third parties' development technology and manufacture capabilities. Please refer to the company's Securities and Exchange Commission filings, copies of which are available from the company without charge.

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