Strengthening the collaborative ecosystem: SoC FPGA becomes a powerful weapon

Altera intends to gradually strengthen FPGA co-processors through more advanced process technology and closer industry cooperation, significantly improve the overall performance of SoC FPGA, and create greater differentiation advantages for seizing the embedded system market. As the penetration rate of SoC FPGA in the embedded system market rises rapidly, FPGA manufacturers have developed more competitive SoC FPGAs, innovated ASIC-level programmable architectures, and strengthened exchanges with SoC partners, intending to create a more complete SoC ecosystem and aggressively attack the embedded system application market.

　　"Altera SoC FPGAs connect ARM dual-core processors with the advanced technology of Altera SoC FPGAs, using dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore processors and hard-core memory controllers and peripherals to establish high-performance interconnection between the processor system and FPGAs," said Xie Xiaodong, product marketing manager for the Asia Pacific region at Altera. "Altera SoC platforms help meet the stringent requirements of embedded engineers for system performance, system power consumption, circuit board area, and system cost."

Xie Xiaodong, Product Marketing Manager, Asia Pacific, Altera

　　Unlike other FPGA manufacturers who focus on FPGA product development strategy, Altera not only maintains the premise of developing high-performance products, but also attaches importance to the support of SoC partners. Xie Xiaodong further pointed out that many embedded operating systems and development tools have announced support for Altera SoC FPGA. Although Altera is a latecomer in the embedded field, it is willing to serve as a platform to aggregate more embedded development partners.

　　Undoubtedly, the support of Altera SoC partners provides more complete guarantee for the application of SoC in the embedded system market.

　　The ARM DS-5 Altera Edition Toolkit provides embedded software developers with unprecedented full-chip visualization and control capabilities through the standard DS-5 user interface. In addition, it is also helpful in eliminating the debugging barriers of integrating dual-core processor subsystems with the FPGA architecture in Altera SoCs.

　　As R&D cases become increasingly complex, SoC FPGA helps Altera meet the stringent requirements of embedded engineers for system performance, system power consumption, circuit board area and system cost. Fuji Software's Android operating system expands the advantages of the SoC platform, realizes networking functions, and brings more operability and flexibility to embedded engineers. QNX's QNX system has advantages in smoothness and graphic display, and can also run Android virtual machines. This combined with Fuji Software's Android operating system can help embedded engineers bring more applications. In addition, Lauterbach's debugger and compiler products and McTai Technology's uC/OS-II, uC/OS-III, and GNU compiler tools have brought various differentiated support to the Altera SoC platform.

　　In fact, the strong alliance between embedded system software vendors and FPGA vendors is an inevitable trend, and is also the differentiation of FPGA vendors in successfully entering the embedded system market. When the FPGA architecture reaches a certain level, it makes sense to use software to ensure that the entire system is more stable, achieve greater differentiation, expand innovation in application areas, and accelerate the division of the market share of ASIC, ASSP and DSP suppliers in embedded systems.