US : HardCopy Stratix(TM) devices from Altera Corporation will power the next generation of 3G mobile communications infrastructure products from LG Electronics, Inc. (LGE), Altera announced today. LGE chose Altera's low-cost HardCopy Stratix devices to shorten their time-to-market, increase integration, and provide a risk-free, seamless migration path to the lowest manufacturing cost. By reducing the cost of developing and deploying 3G infrastructure, LGE's Altera-enabled products will broaden mobile subscriber access to the benefits of 3G communications, including expanded voice, music, Internet, and other data services.

Above figure shows HardCopy Stratix Device Development.

"Altera HardCopy Stratix devices provide a low-risk, cost-optimized, high-volume solution for our next generation 3G base station, eliminating the need for us to use an ASIC or standard product," said Bong-Bin Park, senior vice president of the CDMA System Research Lab at LGE. "By offering industry-leading density and a seamless migration path from Stratix(TM) FPGAs to HardCopy(TM) devices, Altera improves our time-to-market and lowers our costs, enabling us to penetrate new markets."

LGE's choice of HardCopy Stratix devices enables them to prototype with Altera's Stratix device family, which is the only programmable logic offering that provides the capacity and resulting integration capability they require. Using Stratix devices affords LGE the highest degree of flexibility during their product development phase, since they can reprogram the devices to address changing needs at the engineer's desktop, a capability which is impossible with alternative component solutions such as ASICs.

"Only four months after its introduction, the HardCopy Stratix solution is enjoying great success as industry leaders like LGE select it for their critical products needs," said Alain Bismuth, vice president of the HardCopy product group at Altera. "The HardCopy solution delivers the cost advantages of ASICs, and further eliminates the risks and long development times associated with ASIC design, making it very attractive for LGE and other product manufacturers."

"3G equipment vendors are faced with the challenge of rolling out lower cost offerings with higher capabilities while mitigating their risks in the face of a slowdown in 3G deployment," said Don Faria, senior vice president of the communications business group at Altera. "Altera worked closely with LGE to provide a solution that significantly reduces their costs, delivers leading-edge capabilities not available from any other component provider, and keeps their manufacturing risk to a minimum. Our mutual cooperation will further support LGE's leadership in mobile communications and reinforces our position as the leading programmable logic supplier to 3G infrastructure developers."

About HardCopy Stratix Devices

Altera's HardCopy Stratix devices are the industry's only low-cost mask-programmed devices with ASIC-level performance, price, and features that customers can take to production virtually risk-free. This unique ASIC-alternative is directly accessible for design through Altera's Quartus(R) II version 3.0 design software. The HardCopy Stratix devices maintain the same features as the successful Stratix FPGAs and on average a 50 percent performance increase and up to a 40 percent decrease in power consumption over the equivalent Stratix FPGAs. Altera's HardCopy Stratix devices are ideal for high-performance, high-volume applications in the networking, wireless communication, high- end consumer electronics, industrial, test, and medical markets. For more information about the HardCopy Stratix devices, please visit www.altera.com/hardcopystratix.

About Stratix Devices

The Stratix device family is the industry's first family of production-qualified FPGAs built on a 0.13-micron, all-layer copper process and the winner of EDN magazine's 2002 Digital IC Innovation Award. Featuring embedded DSP blocks, embedded RAM blocks and support for leading-edge and emerging I/O standards, Stratix devices give designers the performance and densities they need to meet the challenges of high-bandwidth system design.