Cyclone III FPGA

Cyclone III FPGA Family

Cyclone® III device family offers a unique combination of high functionality, low power, and low cost. Based on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company’s (TSMC) low-power (LP) process technology, silicon optimizations, and software features to minimize power consumption, the Cyclone III device family provides the ideal solution for your high-volume, low-power, and cost-sensitive applications. To address the unique design needs, the Cyclone III device family offers the following two variants:
* Cyclone III—lowest power, high functionality with the lowest cost
* Cyclone III LS—lowest power FPGAs with security
With densities ranging from about 5,000 to 200,000 logic elements (LEs) and 0.5 Megabits (Mb) to 8 Mb of memory for less than ¼ watt of static power consumption, the Cyclone III device family makes it easier for you to meet your power budget. Cyclone III LS devices are the first to implement a suite of security features at the silicon, software, and intellectual property (IP) level on a low-power and high-functionality FPGA platform. This suite of security features protects the IP from tampering, reverse engineering, and cloning. In addition, Cyclone III LS devices support design separation which enables you to introduce redundancy in a single chip to reduce the size, weight, and power of your application.
Cyclone III device family supports vertical migration that allows you to migrate your device to other devices with the same dedicated pins, configuration pins, and power pins for given package-across device densities. This allows you to optimize device density and cost as your design evolves

Features

• Lowest power consumption with TSMC low-power process technology and Altera® power-aware design flow
• Reduced or eliminated cooling system costs
• Configuration security using advanced encryption standard (AES) with 256-bit volatile key
• Routing architecture optimized for design separation flow with the Quartus® II software
• Ability to perform zeroization to clear contents of the FPGA logic, CRAM, embedded memory, and AES key
• Nios® II embedded processor for Cyclone III device family, offering low-cost and custom-fit embedded processing solutions
• Supports high-speed external memory interfaces such as DDR, DDR2, SDR SDRAM, and QDRII SRAM