Agilex 3 FPGA
In an effort to increase the market and use cases for its programmable solutions, Altera, an Intel company, today unveiled a range of FPGA hardware, software, and development tools. At its annual developer's conference, Altera revealed new information on its next-generation, cost- and power-optimized Agilex 3 FPGA in addition to new development kits and software support for its Agilex 5 FPGAs.Altera
The Reason It Is Important
As the only independent supplier of FPGAs, Altera offers full stack solutions made for intelligent edge applications, high-performance accelerated computing systems, and next-generation communications infrastructure. Thanks to the company's wide selection of FPGAs, customers can acquire flexible hardware that swiftly adapts to changing market demands brought about by the era of intelligent computing. Altera is leading the industry in the use of FPGAs in AI inference workloads with its Agilex FPGAs loaded with AI Tensor Blocks and its Altera FPGA AI Suite, which accelerates FPGA development for AI inference using popular frameworks like TensorFlow, PyTorch, and OpenVINO toolkit and tested FPGA development flows.Agilex 3 from Intel
The Benefits of Agilex 3 FPGAs
Altera recently released further information about the Agilex 3 FPGA, which is intended to meet the demands of embedded and intelligent edge applications in terms of power, performance, and size. Agilex 3 FPGAs are more integrated, quicker, and more secure than their predecessors—with densities ranging from 25K to 135K logic elements—all packed into a smaller package.The FPGA family includes an on-chip twin Cortex A55 ARM hard processor subsystem with programmable fabric improved with artificial intelligence capabilities. The FPGA for intelligent edge applications enables real-time computation for time-sensitive applications like driverless automobiles and the industrial Internet of Things (IoT). Agilex 3 FPGAs enable seamless integration of sensors, actuators, drivers, and machine learning algorithms for smart factory automation technologies, such as robots and machine vision.
To meet the demands of both defense and commercial enterprises, Agilex 3 FPGAs offer a number of significant security improvements over the previous generation, including bitstream encryption, authentication, and physical anti-tamper detection. These features ensure consistent and safe functioning, which is beneficial for critical applications in industrial automation and other domains.
Agilex 3 FPGAs leverage Altera's HyperFlex architecture to provide a performance improvement of 1.9×1 over the previous generation. High clock rates can be reached in an FPGA that is optimized for both cost and power by extending the HyperFlex architecture to Agilex 3 FPGAs. System performance can be enhanced by adding support for LPDDR4X Memory and integrating high-speed transceivers with up to 12.5 Gbps of capacity.
In Q1 2025, Agilex 3 FPGA software support is expected to start, and in the middle of the year, development kits and production shipments will follow.
How FPGA Software Tools Accelerate Product Launch
Prime Pro Quartus
Another method that FPGA software tools speed up time-to-market is through the Latest Features of Altera's Quartus Prime Pro software, which offers developers industry-leading compilation times, increased designer productivity, and accelerated time-to-market. Improved support for embedded applications and access to more Agilex devices are made possible with the upcoming version of Quartus Prime Pro 24.3.Customers can utilize this upcoming version to create Agilex 5 FPGA D-series, which targets an even wider range of use cases than Agilex 5 FPGA E-series, which are optimized to enable efficient computation in edge applications. Altera offers free software support for its Agilex 5 FPGA E-series through the Quartus Prime Software, aiming to reduce entry barriers for its mid-range FPGA family.
This software release now includes support for embedded programs that use an integrated hard-processor subsystem, Altera's RISC-V solution, or the Nios V soft-core processor, which may be instantiated in the FPGA fabric. Customers can now access Agilex 5 FPGA design examples that showcase key Nios V features, such as branch prediction, lockstep, and comprehensive ECC. The Agilex 5 SoC FPGA-based hard processor subsystem now has new OS and RTOS functionality thanks to the most recent iterations of Linux, VxWorks, and Zephyr.
How Developers Should Get Started
Altera and its ecosystem partners have announced the release of 11 more Agilex 5 FPGA-based development kits and system-on-modules (SoMs), to complement the wide array of Agilex 5 and Agilex 7 FPGA-based solutions available to help developers get started.With FPGA development kits, developers can rapidly go from prototype to full-volume production, see firsthand the benefits and capabilities that Agilex FPGAs have to offer, and obtain Altera hardware at a reasonable cost.
Kits are offered for every area and a broad variety of application scenarios. Check out Altera's Partner Showcase website to learn how to purchase.
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