SAN JOSE, Calif., 3 August 2009. Officials at Altera Corp. (NASDAQ: ALTR) announced the company has extended the temperature range for selected members of its Stratix III field programmable gate array (FPGA) family to support military applications operating in rugged environments.

Components used in military applications such as radar, electronic countermeasures, and ground-combat communications equipment are required to operate in extreme environments. Selected members of Altera's high-performance Stratix III FPGAs support these applications by enabling operation between -55 to 125 degrees Celsius. Altera's military-grade Stratix III FPGAs deliver a core clock performance as fast as 600 MHz, offer 533-MHz DDR3 DIMM support, and feature as much as 150K logic elements (LEs), 8 megabits of embedded memory, and as much as 896 18x18 embedded multipliers. Stratix III FPGAs also feature Altera's Programmable Power Technology, enabling customers to minimize power consumption and maximize performance in military applications, Altera officials say.

"Altera's enhanced commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) strategy strives to meet the [Department of Defense's] mandate of using commercially available products in military systems that meet their reliability, risk, and performance requirements," says Amr El-Ashmawi, senior business unit manager of Altera's military/aerospace business unit. "With our military-grade Stratix III FPGAs, Altera delivers an FPGA solution that specifically addresses the military's size, weight, and power constraints while helping keep costs in check."

For more information on Stratix III FPGAs, visit www.altera.com/pr/stratix. A technical brief with additional information on Stratix III FPGA's military temperature range support is found at www.altera.com/literature/tb/tb-107.pdf. To learn more about Altera's enhanced COTS initiative or its solutions targeting the military market, visit www.altera.com/enhanced-cots.