Introduction
The Cyclone® III FPGA family offered by Altera® is a cost-optimized, memory-rich
FPGA family. CycloneIII FPGAs are built on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing
Company's (TSMC) 65-nm low-power (LP) process technology with additional silicon
optimizations and software features to minimize power consumption. With this third
generation in the Cyclone series, Altera broadens the number of high volume,
cost-sensitive applications that can benefit from FPGAs. With a good design practice
and a clear understanding of the design flow of the CycloneIII device, your design
flow will be much easier. This design guideline summarizes not only the various
aspects of the CycloneIII device, but also the Quartus® II software features that you
should look into when designing with the CycloneIII devices.
This document covers the following topics:
■ “Device Selection” on page1
■ “Early System Planning” on page3
■ “Board Design Considerations” on page17
■ “Design and Compilation” on page28
■ “Verification” on page45
■ “Design Debugging” on page55
■ “Testing” on page56
■ “Other Considerations” on page56