Altera military campaign drafts PLDs

Electronic News, July 4, 1994 by Jim DeTar

SAN JOSE, CALIF.--Altera Corp. is expanding its presence in the military market with the introduction of four programmable logic devices (PLDs) manufactured as MIL-STD-883 compliant. The move marks the first time that Altera's FLEX family will be offered in the military market.

Altera said that, despite the shrinking military market, demand for the military spec devices is increasing as designers try to increase functionality while keeping design costs down. The company's FLEX 8000 and MAX 7000 devices, with up to 12,000 usable gates and 184 user I/Os and clock speeds up to 70MHz, are now MIL spec compliant. Altera already offers its MAX 5000 and Classic families of PLD devices in military standard versions.

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"This is in response to customer demand," said Richard Cappello, Altera's military product marketing engineer. While defense spending continues to decrease, there has been a renewed emphasis on upgrading and retrofitting existing programs, Altera said; as a result, the electronics content of defense and aerospace projects is increasing and design engineers are looking for off-the-shelf solutions to integrate a number of system features into smaller board space.

"We will gauge the need for military products going forward," said Bob Beachler, Altera's manager of strategic marketing and communications. The company is initially offering the devices in military temperature range rather than fully 883-compliant because there is demand for those types of devices, Mr. Beachler said. Full MILSTD-883 qualification is expected to be completed 4Q94.

"We have started to see some military customers ordering military temperature range devices and not full 883-compliant ones. Our strategy going forward is to aggressively pursue 883 business with these device. We have picked the most popular devices we have to put into military versions. Depending on the demand from our customer base, we will bring more 883 devices to market."

By offering military versions, Altera allows military designers to emulate most gate array designs, which in turn allows verification of the system before releasing to production.

In the FLEX family, the 12,000-gate FLEX EPF81188 and 8,000-gate FLEX EPF8820 are designed to expedite development cycles and enable quick time-to-market for OEMs. Applications requiring high-density and high register counts, such as pipeline data paths, data transformation and compression algorithms, can be integrated into FLEX 8000 devices while supporting fast system clock rates. Low standby power consumption makes them suitable for use in battery-powered instrumentation and their in-circuit reconfigurability makes them an alternative choice for applications that require on-the-fly reconfiguration. Additionally, the EPF8820 features JTAG boundary-scan testing to facilitate testing of the final design.

Two members of the MAX 7000E family--the 3,800-gate EPM7192E and 5,000-gate EPM7256E now offered in military spec-compliant versions--feature Altera's patented carrier technology to enable ease-of-use of surface-mount devices in prototyping situations. These chips are shipped with preformed gull-wing leads in a removable protective plastic carrier, with molded channels encasing and protecting each QFP lead for programming during prototyping.

All of the military version MAX 7000 and FLEX 8000 devices also will be available in pin grid array (PGA) packages.

Altera recently rounded out its MAX 7000 family with lower gate count, lower cost but faster speed devices: the MAX EPM7160E and MAX EPM7128E (EN, May 23), but will not at this time offer these devices for the military market.

All Altera military devices are supported by Altera's MAX Plus II development tools available on both PC and workstations platforms. In addition, MAX Plus II provides integration with CAE tools from Data I/O, Mentor Graphics, Synopsys, Viewlogic and others

The Defense Electronics Supply Center (DESC) pricing in 100-unit lots is as follows: EPF81188, $950 each; EPF8820 $645-$745 each; EPM7192E, $447 each; and EPM7256E, $550-$680 each.