SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Altera Corporation (NASDAQ: ALTR) and PMC-Sierra Inc. (NASDAQ: PMCS) today announced a partnership to deliver a full suite of interoperable high-speed serial I/O solutions based on Altera’s programmable logic and PMC-Sierra’s transceiver technologies. The combination of these technologies will allow users of Altera’s low-cost Cyclone™ II FPGA family, high-density Stratix® II FPGA family or HardCopy® II structured ASIC family to seamlessly integrate these devices into systems based on high-speed serial protocols via PMC-Sierra’s PM8358 QuadPHY 10GX serializer-deserializer (SERDES) transceiver. This new chipset solution complements Altera’s FPGAs with integrated transceivers and PMC Sierra’s ASSPs, and extends the options for customers targeting high-volume, cost-sensitive backplane and line-interface solutions.

“PMC-Sierra’s high-speed serial devices are widely deployed to increase the throughput and decrease the costs for serial communication links used for networking, storage, computing and wireless applications,” said Travis Karr, director of marketing at PMC-Sierra. “The combination of our QuadPHY 10GX SERDES and Altera’s FPGAs provides our customers the ability to deploy cost-effective solutions that support the major emerging serial protocols with the rates of 1.2 to 3.2 gigabits per second.”

Designers are increasingly using serial protocols, including PCI Express, Advanced Switching, Serial RapidIO™, Gigabit Ethernet, XAUI, Fibre Channel (1G, 2G and 10G), Open Base Station Architecture Initiative (OBSAI), and Common Protocol Radio Interface (CPRI) to implement chip-to-chip, board-to-board and system-to-system communication. The flexibility of PMC-Sierra’s PM8358 transceiver, combined with Altera® FPGAs, allows customers using these protocols to design cost-sensitive and high-performance products. For those customers who prefer a single FPGA/transceiver solution, Altera offers integrated SERDES solutions.

“Altera believes in giving customers the flexibility of implementing their designs with either embedded or external transceivers depending upon their density, cost and performance requirements,” said Jack Ogawa, Altera’s senior director of partner solutions. “Stratix GX, with its embedded transceivers, provides the benefit of reducing board complexity via SERDES integration, while our partnership with PMC-Sierra for external transceivers provides the advantage of high-speed serial I/O coupled with the architectural enhancements and cost reductions of our latest 90-nm device families.”

Altera Corp.

PMC-Sierra Inc.