Cyclone series continues ...

Finally, Altera launched Cyclone III, after a couple of months lauching Stratix III. Of course, success stories should be continued... That's why we still see Cyclone III and Stratix III today.

To be honest, I anticipated improvement on the Cyclone III logic elements architecture compared with Cyclone II, such as implementing a 5-input LUT in a logic element. Nonetheless, other improved features are pretty interesting, too. I am particularly excited with M9K, PLL reconfiguration and improved I/O element.

The cost is an important factor when you are evaluating a new device. However, the cost factor is never mentioned in the data sheet or handbook. I am referring to Digikey for cost comparison among all the Cyclone series families. EP3C25 is chosen as benchmark as it is the only Cyclone III FPGA available now. The Cyclone II and Cyclone FPGAs that come closest to this density are EP2C20 and EP1C20, respectively. No doubt, from the table below, Cyclone III is certainly worth considered if you have a new design to start with a low-cost FPGA. At a slightly lower price, you can get a higher performance, same density and twice internal memory size for Cyclone III FPGA, compared with Cyclone II and Cyclone I.

Cyclone series	EP3C25F256C8NES	EP2C20F256C8	EP1C20F324C8
Price	$44.80	$42.70	$60.00

Low power consumption seems to be the highlight for Cyclone III in the Altera marketing slides. Unfortunately, that doesn’t interest me too much as I am not working very much on the portable designs. Anyway, I still hope to use 65-nm Cyclone III and Stratix III parts for my new coming designs.