Altera

Altera's strategy for delivering the benefits of the 65-nm semiconductor manufacturing process focuses on leveraging advanced technologies and methods to provide the most capable and highest performance devices at the lowest cost, while minimizing risk and ensuring short time-to-market for customers. Altera's market share gains with 130 nm and 90 nm devices demonstrate that containing the risks of advanced semiconductor technologies improves an FPGA architecture's attractiveness in the market. To that end, Altera has been steadily developing and testing its 65-nm technology since early 2003. This paper explores the engineering strategies Altera uses to minimize production and schedule risk to customers while delivering the substantial improvements in density, performance, cost, and power consumption that are possible with the 65-nm process.