Product category:
Programmable Logic Devices
News Release from: Altera Europe
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 27 July 2005
One-thousandth patent for Altera
"Programmable logic device with soft multiplier" is Altera's 1000th patent.
Altera Corp has received its 1000th US patent The new patent, "Programmable logic device with soft multiplier", adds to a broad portfolio of patents built up over Altera's 22-year history of innovation
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 27 Jun 2008 at 8.00am (UK)
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This portfolio underscores Altera's technology leadership position at a time when the electronics industry is putting greater emphasis on its use of programmable logic as an alternative to ASICs and ASSPs.
Altera invented the first reprogrammable logic device, the EP300, in 1983.
Starting with its first patent, "Programmable logic array device using EPROM technology", by founder Bob Hartman et al, Altera's patent portfolio covers all aspects of programmable logic, including devices, on-chip transceivers, memory and digital signal processing (DSP) blocks, IP cores, I/O circuits, development software and design flows.
Further reading
Shrink to 40nm increases FPGA capabilities
The Stratix IV family has up to 680K logic elements, 2x bigger than Altera's Stratix III family, which currently comprise currently the largest FPGAs on the market.
FPGAs support serial gigabit interface
Stratix III FPGAs are the industry's first programmable logic devices able to support Gigabit Ethernet SGMII on LVDS pins.
In addition, Altera holds a number of important structured ASIC patents issued over the years as part of its development of the HardCopy structured ASIC family.
"Since its founding, Altera has been active in filing patents to protect the innovations of our employees, to stay competitive and to aggressively preserve our position as an industry leader", said John Daane, Altera's President, CEO and Chairman of the Board.
"In spite of the cyclical nature of the semiconductor industry, we've always continued to invest in the development and protection of our innovations".
"In addition to the one thousand patents already issued to Altera, we have hundreds more in the pipeline, which we have filed in recent years".
Many of the technologies patented by Altera are the keys to its success in the programmable logic business.
For example, the Altera patented redundancy technology, which dramatically increases yields and lowers device costs, was a major contributing factor to the company's successful product rollouts at the 130 and 90nm process nodes.
"The growing importance of programmable logic to the electronics industry at large is being aggressively met by the incumbent programmable logic vendors", said Senior Analyst Richard Wawrzyniak of Semico Research.
"It's because of these innovations that programmable logic is finding its way into new markets, such as consumer and DSP applications".
Altera's implementation of soft multipliers, which is partially covered by the "Programmable logic device with soft multiplier" patent, further supports the penetration of programmable logic into the DSP market.
The implementation by Altera uses the TriMatrix memory blocks in the Stratix family of devices for applications that require a very large number of multipliers, such as third-generation (3G) basestations and image-processing applications.
With these soft multipliers, in addition to the hard-wired DSP blocks in the Stratix series of devices, designers can customise their designs to match the requirements of almost any DSP application.
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