Cyclone III low-cost FPGAs
Unlimited possibilities
Your design ideas have the potential to prosper.
But, in the end, they are only as good as yourability to execute. Cyclone® III FPGAs deliver thevalue you need for cost-sensitive applications—the ability to produce more, sooner, and for less.
With Cyclone III FPGAs, your potential for great
design is unlimited. Watch your great ideas takeroot and grow.

Unlimited possibilities
Altera® Cyclone III low-cost FPGAs deliver anunprecedented combination of low power, highfunctionality, and low cost. Manufactured using theTaiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company’s(TSMC’s) 65-nm low-power (LP) process technology,
these devices consume very low power, often for a lower
total cost than ASICs. Cyclone III FPGAs are part of ourcomplete design solutions portfolio, ideal for your costsensitive, high-volume applications.

With Cyclone III FPGAs, your great ideas
will quickly turn into revenue. Your
possibilities are unlimited.

Cyclone III FPGAs • March 2007 • www.altera.com

We deliver what you need—every timeindustry’s firstlow-cost
65-nm FPGAWe know you’re pressed to go to market in a hurry with premium quality, cutting-edge products.
We’re also aware that the days of deep pockets are over. At Altera, you drive our product definition.
We listen to you carefully to uncover your design and business challenges, making you the inspirationfor our next-generation products. And we’ll keep on listening—from product definition throughdesign to delivery. We defined, designed, and are delivering Cyclone III FPGAs with the ideal features
for your needs—nothing more, nothing less.
After product definition, Altera uses a very rigorous product design process, working hand in handwith our foundry partner TSMC. We validate functionality with dozens of test chips to ensure quality
and on-time delivery so you can design with confidence.

The FPGA advantage gets you tomarket first
You’re in a race and anything you can do to be
more efficient is going to positively impact yourbottom line. FPGAs give you the flexibility you
need because they are reprogrammable. Even
after your product is in the market, you canmake updates on the fly and adapt to market
changes fast. You can use Cyclone III FPGAs as
the heart of your system. If you already have an
ASIC in your system, you can use Cyclone III
FPGAs to coprocess and enhance your current
product with added features. Or, you can offload
functionality from the ASIC onto the Cyclone III
FPGA. You can use our devices for typical ASSP
functions and not be locked into keeping thatfunctionality in the future. The real benefit:
shorter development time and low cost. You’ll
cut your time from a year or more to just weeks.
You can continuously introduce featureenhancements and respond to customer needs orcompetitor threats. The risk is next to none.

Cyclone III FPGAs • March 2007 • www.altera.comFeatures and benefits

CycloneCycloneIIIIIIfloorplan
floorplan

You can turn ideas into revenue faster thanever because we deliver numerous features andbenefits that help you lower your system anddevelopment costs. Flexibility enables you tokeep up with fast-evolving standards easily.
Scalable digital signal processing (DSP) performance and embedded memory let you increaseor enhance feature sets. All of this with the lowest
power consumption of any FPGA available
today. To top it off, we’re the lowest-cost FPGA
solution around. Choose Altera to win.

Phase-locked loops

M9K memory blocks
Logic array
Embedded 18-bit x 18-bit
multipliersSide I/O cells with support for
LVDS signals up to 875 Mbps
Top and bottom I/O cells formemory interfaces up to 400 Mbps

Lowest-power

65-nm
FPGAs

Cost optimizedfor thebest value
anywhereCompletesystemintegration



Cyclone III FPGAs • March 2007 • www.altera.com• Manufactured using a low-power 65-nm process technology.
• Core static power as low as 35 mW at 25oC junction temperature.
• Support for hot-socketing operation so unused I/O banks can be turned
off when there’s no current.
• Low-power benefits include: system thermal management, elimination
or reduction in cooling system costs, and extended battery life forportable applications.

• Staggered I/O ring to reduce die size and board space.
• Selection of low-cost packages.
• Support for low-cost serial flash and commodity parallel flash configuration devices.
• Cyclone series FPGAs are built from the ground up for low cost.

• 1.7 times the density to 120,000 logic elements (LEs) and over 3.5 times
the embedded memory to 4 Mbits over Cyclone II FPGAs.
• 260-MHz multiplier performance with the highest multiplier-to-logic
ratio in the industry.
• Robust clock management and synthesis with dynamically reconfigurable and flexible phase-locked loops (PLLs).
• Improved signal integrity with adjustable I/O slew rates.
• Support for high-speed external memory interfaces including DDR,
DDR2, SDR SDRAM, and QDRII SRAM with an autocalibrating PHY
for fast timing closure.
• Support for I/O standards including LVTTL, LVCMOS, SSTL, HighSpeed Transceiver Logic (HSTL), PCI Express, LVPECL, LVDS, miniLVDS, reduced swing differential signaling (RSDS), and point-to-point
differential signaling (PPDS).

Forging ahead in new applications
Due to their unprecedented combination of low power, high functionality, and low cost, you can use
Cyclone III FPGAs in an ever-expanding list of high-volume applications—many of which were previously exclusive
to ASICs and ASSPs. These are just a few of the many application areas where we can help you prosper.

Video and image
processing
Game, set, match point. You’ll
catch all the action clearly in bothstandard-definition and highdefinition transmissions. Our
devices are a perfect fit for DSP,
video system I/O, video compression
encoding and decoding, and othervideo and image processing tasks.
Drive these cost-sensitive applications and others with the parallel
processing capability of DSP-richand memory-rich Cyclone III FPGAs.
The ball keeps moving faster. Withus, you’ll stay a step ahead.

Displays

Wireless

Picture perfect. That’s what you wantto achieve, whether it’s liquid crystaldisplays, plasma display panels,
plasma low-profile, or liquid crystal
on silicon. Of course, you have toreach your goals faster and cheaper
than the competition. And there’s a
lot of competition to beat. We help
you create a single platform that canbe used for multiple product lines
and image resolutions. You’ll be able
to deliver the latest feature set in notime. Get to volume first using
display-optimized features toseamlessly integrate designs, rapidly
update products, and lower costs inyour system so you’re crystal clear.

Connecting on the go shapes ourworld. People keep moving farther,faster, in no time, and so does thewireless technology that makes it
all possible. In areas such as digitalintermediate frequency (IF) andbaseband modems, you can achieve
high-bandwidth parallel processing.
Lower your cost and power consumption with Cyclone III DSP-richand memory-rich FPGAs. Make theworld a better connected place.

The complete answer for your design challenges

Get started now.
Download your free Quartus IIWeb Edition software to design
with Cyclone III FPGAs today.

Your creative energy can bring about the next blockbuster
product. Altera’s suite of complete, easy-to-use, free tools andsupport assure you of a smooth and successful design process.
We give you a complete answer for your design challenges. WithAltera, you can focus your creative energy on the leading edge—
exactly where you belong.

Maximize productivity with Quartus II
design software
Quartus® II software is the industry leader in performance andproductivity for low-power, low-cost FPGA designs. Automatic
system-level integration and industry-leading compile times will
help you close timing faster. You will also benefit from ourautomated power analysis and optimization features. Quartus II
software makes designing easy and fast, so you can move more ofyour designs to production sooner.

Cyclone III FPGAs • March 2007 • www.altera.com

Intellectual property

Nios II embedded processor

Altera and its partners provide
off-the-shelf intellectual
property (IP) cores. You canuse these pre-optimized cores
easily, reducing design andtest time.

Get the performance you need with the right feature set and keep costs down.
With the versatility of our Nios® II soft-core embedded processor, you can build
an exact-fit processor, customized for your application in minutes. A Nios IIprocessor implemented in a Cyclone III FPGA allows you to choose the exact setof CPUs, peripherals, and interfaces that you need ,and to remotely upgrade in thefield. You can address changing requirements to stay competitive. You can also
increase performance without changing your board design—accelerating only
functions that need it and combining many functions onto one chip. With theNios II embedded processor, you’ll lower overall cost, design complexity, andpower consumption. Assemble an exact-fit processor system every time with theworld’s most versatile processor.

Low-cost development kits and free reference designs
The Cyclone III FPGA Starter Kit is available today to get your next design up
and running in hardware as quickly as possible. Whether your’re designing forcommunications, embedded systems hardware or software, or vertical market areas
such as video and image processing, display, wireless, or another high-volume, costsensitive application, Altera and partner development kits give you everything youneed to create and implement your design right out of the box.

Cyclone III device overviewDevice featuresthat deliver functionality.

DeviceLEs

M9K
MemoryBlocks

TotalMemory(Mbits)

Multipliers

PLLs

Total GlobalClocks

Maximum
User I/OPins

EP3C5

5,136

460.4

23210182

EP3C1010,320

460.4

23

210182

EP3C16

15,408

56

0.5

56

420346

EP3C25

24,624

66

0.6

66

420215

EP3C4039,600126

1.1126420535

EP3C5555,856

260

2.3

156

420377

EP3C8081,264

305

2.7

244

420428

EP3C120

119,088432

3.9288420531

Cyclone III package overview1
A selection of low-cost packages
and user I/O pin counts.

Device

E144

EP3C594

EP3C1094

EP3C1684160

168

EP3C2582

148

156

EP3C401

Q240

F256

F324

F484

F780

182

U484

182

182

128

U256
182

346

168

215
195

346

156
331

535

331

EP3C55

327

377

217

EP3C80

295

429

295

EP3C120283

531

For more information on packages, see Cyclone FPGA Series Package and I/O Matrix at www.altera.com/selectorguides.

Cyclone III FPGAs • March 2007 • www.altera.com

Now’s the time to prosper.
Go ahead and catapult your great design ideas intounstoppable growth—your possibilities are unlimited.

Turn ideas into revenue.
www.altera.com/cyclone3

Cyclone III FPGAs • March 2007 • www.altera.com

Altera Corporation

Altera European Headquarters

Altera Japan Ltd.

Altera International Ltd.

101 Innovation Drive
San Jose, CA 95134
USA
Telephone: (408) 544-7000
www.altera.com

Holmers Farm Way
High Wycombe
Buckinghamshire
HP12 4XF
United Kingdom
Telephone: (44) 1494 602000

Shinjuku i-Land Tower 32F
6-5-1, Nishi-Shinjuku
Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo 163-1332
Japan
Telephone: (81) 3 3340 9480
www.altera.co.jp

2102 Tower 6
The Gateway, Harbour City
9 Canton RoadTsimshatsui Kowloon
Hong Kong
Telephone: (852) 2945 7000

Copyright © 2007 Altera Corporation. All rights reserved. Altera, the stylized Altera logo, specific device designations, and all other words and logos that are identified as trademarks and/or service marks are,unless noted otherwise, the trademarks and service marks of Altera Corporation in the U.S. and other countries. All other product or service names are the property of their respective holders. Altera products
GB-01003-1.0
are protected under numerous U.S. and foreign patents and pending applications, mask work rights, and copyrights. February 2007; 20K