With the rising cost of ASIC/ASSP research and development, its market share is gradually being replaced by FPGA. Obviously, FPGA has become a lucrative "strategic weapon". Xilinx and Altera are the leaders in the PFGA industry. Xilinx and Altera are tit-for-tat in the field of FPGA and even PLD. Since the two sides have been competing for a long time, the dominance of FPGA has changed from time to time. We try to sort out and summarize from the important events. In this article, we will compare Altera FPGA and Xilinx FPGA.

1. The main similarities and differences between Xilinx and Altera:

The main difference between Xilinx and Altera is that they both adopt a Fabless design model; the main difference is that in addition to designing FPGA chips, Altera also has structural ASICs of application-specific integrated circuits, while Xilinx has only FPGAs. However, in today‘s increasingly fierce FPGA application, it has almost become a consensus that ASIC is gradually replaced.

2. What are the advantages and disadvantages of Altera FPGA and Xilinx FPGA?

1) Xilinx‘s FPGA has aerospace grade, but altera does not, so there is no altera‘s share in aerospace military products, but xilinx has it;

2) In the comparison of top devices, the speed and other performance of xilinx are always a little higher than that of altera;

3) From the perspective of FPGA resources, the short-term resources of xilinx are richer than those of altera, that is to say, when the logic resources are fully used, xilinx is easier to route;

At the same time, due to the design of more short-circuit resources, the device cost of xilinx is higher than that of altera for devices of the same speed grade and logic resources, which is also reflected in the final price. Therefore, as long as altera can satisfy your design, Then it will have a higher cost performance than xilinx;

4) In terms of software, the ease of use of the integrated interface of quartus is better than that of ISE, and the script support of ISE is better than that of quartus; therefore, for beginners, quartus is easier to get started, and for skilled users, in large-scale design projects In the development of ISE, ISE will be more convenient, because it can carry out more fine-grained control and automation of back-end design.

The above is the comparison between Altera FPGA and Xilinx FPGA, hoping to help you choose.