Altera Corporation, during the Embedded Systems Conference, announced a system-on-a-programmable-chip (Sopc) design solution for embedded ARIvI9-based elaboration products for the Excalibur line.

The availability of EPXA10 devices based on ARM9, part of Altera’s Excalibur embedded elaboration solutions, fits in the company’s Sopc strategy, aimed at the integration of a whole system on a single chip, with embedded programmable logic, peripherals, memory and processors.

In terms of Sopc functionality and performance, and owing to the embedded elaboration solutions, Altera’s Excalibur solution sets a new standard. The continuous renewal of the Nios embedded elaboration core, is the operative philosophy applied by Altera and owing to which it designed Nios: an soft processor optimized specifically for PLD implementation. But there is more.

The company also gave the announcement of the imminent availability of an empowered Nios elaboration core, destined to reference projects ensuring Ethernet connectivity and Internet access functions, which guarantee support for Linux’s operative system. Besides this, Altera has concluded a number of agreements with Wind River Systems (support of the operative system VxWorks AR), with Red Hat (support for development tools for embedded GNUPro software) and with Mentor Graphics (support of the Seamless Co-Verification Environment - CVE – on hard-core Excalibur elaboration products).

Excalibur’s embedded elaboration solutions
Owing to the combination between logic, memory and processor core, Excalibur’s new embedded elaboration solutions allow the integration of an entire system inside a single PLD. The three solutions, Nios’ embedded elaboration soft core, and Excalibur’s ARM-based and MIPS-based hard-core embedded processors, offer all elaboration cores’ typical flexibility as well as SOPC logic's integration ability.

Excalibur’s embedded processors can also be used in any application, with gate-count up to 1.000.000 gates, requiring the presence of processors and PLDs. These ensure integration with Altera’s PLD APEX architecture and they are supported by Quartus II’s development software.