Altera Agilex 9 Direct RF-Series AGRW039 SoC FPGA targets high-performance RF systems

Altera’s wideband Agilex 9 Direct RF-Series AGRW039 SoC FPGA is designed for high-performance Radio Frequency (RF) systems in aerospace, defense, and advanced communications systems.

It is the fourth device in Altera’s Agilex 9 Direct RF-Series, and compared to the previous generation AGRW027, the new AGRW039 delivers about 45% more logic resources, 45% more DSP resources, and 43% more block RAM. It also integrates a 64Gsps wideband RF, a hard quad-core Cortex-A53 processor, and supports DDR5 and LPDDR5 memory.

Agilex 9 Direct RF AGRW039 SoC FPGA key features and specifications:

• Hardware CPU – Quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 processor @ up to 1.41 GHz
• FPGA fabric
  • 3.9M logic elements (LEs)
  • 1.3M adaptive logic modules (ALMs)
  • 18,960 M20K memory Blocks
  • 370 Mb M20K memory Size
  • 65,280 MLAB memory count
  • 40 Mb MLAB memory size
  • 24,600 18×19 multipliers
  • 12,300 DSP/AI blocks
  • Single Precision – 18.4 TFLOPS
• Memory I/F – DDR5, LPDDR5, DDR4
• Peripherals
  • PS – 2x USB 2.0, 3x Gigabit Ethernet (EMAC), 2x UART, 4x SPI, 5x I2C, 7x general purpose timers, 4x watchdog timers
  • 2x 8-channel ADC/DACs
    • 64 Gsps sample rate, 10-bit resolution
    • RF Frequency Range: 0.1–36 GHz
    • ADC Rx Max IBW: 32 GHz
    • DAC Tx Max IBW: 6.4 GHz
  • Up to 24x 58G transceivers
  • 2x F-Tiles
    • PCIe hard IP controller (4.0 x16) or Bifurcatable 2x PCIe 4.0 x8 (EP) or 4x 4.0 x4 (RP)
    • Transceiver channel count – 16 channels at 32 Gbps (NRZ) /12 channels at 58 Gbps (PAM4) – RS & KP FEC
    • Advanced networking support:
      • Bifurcatable 400 GbE hard IP block (10/25/50/100/200/400 GbE FEC/PCS/MAC)
      • Bifurcatable 200 GbE hard IP block (10/25/50/100/200 Gbs FEC/PCS)
    • 300G Interlaken
    • IEEE 1588 support
    • PMA direct
• Secure device manager (SDM)
  • AES-256/SHA-256 bitstream encryption/authentication
  • Physically unclonable function (PUF)
  • ECDSA 256/384 boot code authentication
  • Side channel attack protection
• Dimensions – 56 x 45 mm
• Manufacturing process – Intel Fab 7

The Agilex 9 Direct RF-Series is supported by the Quartus Prime Pro Edition design software, and the company also provides example designs, IP blocks, and a development kit for which we have limited information, except for the cool photo below.

We’re also told that the AGRW039 is fully compatible with designs targeting Altera’s Agilex 7 M-Series devices, so customers can preserve designs while moving to the Agilex 9 Direct RF-Series platform.

You’ll find a few more technical details on the product page, and a nice summary on the blog, but I’ll spare you the link to the utterly useless, quasi-misleading press release…

Thanks to TLS for the tip.

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