San Jose, Calif., July 17, 2001--Modelware Corporation, a provider of silicon Virtual Components and design services, and a member of the Altera Megafunction Partners Program (AMPPSM), today announced the immediate availability of Flexbus 3™ and Flexbus 4™ intellectual property cores that support Altera's new Atlantic™ on-chip interface. Designers integrating this intellectual property into Altera's programmable logic devices will be able to seamlessly connect Flexbus devices with other I/O protocols that support Atlantic without having to spend weeks designing their own bridge logic.
"Ease of use for bus IP cores is key for adoption by end-users," said Anthony Dalleggio, Executive VP of Modelware. "We are pleased to provide Altera's Atlantic interface on our bus interface cores. Having a standard interface on the user's side shortens time-to-market by simplifying the integration task."
Modelware's Flexbus intellectual property cores have been specially designed to support Altera's Atlantic™ on-chip bus interface announced on Monday. Atlantic is the "network glue" that enables designers to build plug-and-play system-on-a-programmable-chip (SOPC) solutions using standard interfaces between cores.
"With both the Flexbus 3 and Flexbus 4 cores optimized for programmable logic, communications system designers can increase their time-to-market of OC-48 as well as high-performance OC-192 solutions," said John LoMedico, vice president of digital products at AMCC, which developed the Flexbus 3 and Flexbus 4 standards. "Additionally, we see the benefit for having a well-defined local interface, such as Atlantic, for bridge building applications."
In addition to compatibility with AMCC's OC-48 and OC-192 framer devices, the Modelware Flexbus 4 IP core is compliant with the Optical Internetworking Forum's (OIF) SPI-3 and SPI-4 Phase I specifications, respectively.
"We are very pleased to be working with AMCC and ModelWare to provide solutions to the communications industry. The close integration of ASSP and PLD solutions give system architects a high degree of confidence when designing their products," said Justin Cowling, senior IP marketing manager at Altera.
Altera's Atlantic interface is a scalable, high speed on-chip interface for packet and cell transfer. Optimized for programmable logic devices, Atlantic allows designers to quickly and easily build bridges between incompatible devices, as well as facilitate the user's integration of intellectual property with a simple, clearly defined, and supported interface.
The Atlantic interface is designed as a datapath bus for packet transfer between communications IP. Defined with minimal overhead, Atlantic utilizes approximately 10 control signals in addition to a variable width data bus, and an optional address bus. The control signals include parity, start-of-packet, end-of-packet, error, empty, enable or data valid or data available signals. Atlantic utilizes a simple four-way handshake as flow control and is scalable all the way up to 40Gb/s and beyond.
Altera Corporation, The Programmable Solutions Company®, was founded in 1983 and is a leading supplier of programmable logic devices (PLDs). Altera's CMOS-based PLDs are user-programmable semiconductor chips that enhance flexibility and reduce time-to-market for companies in the communications, computer peripheral, and industrial markets. By using high performance devices, software development tools, and sophisticated intellectual property cores, system-on-a-programmable-chip (SOPC) solutions can be created with embedded processors, memory, and other complex logic together on a single PLD. Altera common stock is traded on The Nasdaq Stock Market under the symbol ALTR. More information on Altera is available on the Internet at http://www.altera.com.
Editor Contacts:
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Bruce Fienberg Altera Corporation (408) 544-6866 bfienber@altera.com |
Susannah Stanford PR21 (415) 369-8105 susannah.stanford@pr21.com |