San Francisco, CA, April 16, 2001 - Chip supplier Altera unveiled its first ARM9-based Excalibur system-on-a-programmable-chip (SOPC) at last week's Embedded Systems Conference and expects to provide samples to customers later this quarter. The ARM9-based EPXA10 device enables system integration on a single chip by combining programmable logic, peripherals, and memory with embedded processors.

Excalibur embedded processors can be used in any application requiring processors and PLDs with gate counts up to 1,000,000. They offer integration with Altera's APEX PLD architecture and are supported by the QuartusII development software, which is optimized for the Excalibur embedded processor solutions.

Altera also announced the upcoming availability of an enhanced Nios soft processor core to be used in reference designs that enable Ethernet connectivity and Internet access. In addition, Altera has partnered with a number of companies to offer support for their operating systems. These include Wind River Systems for VxWorks, Red Hat for their GNUPro embedded software development tools, and Mentor Graphics for their Seamless Co-Verification Environment (CVE) on the Excalibur hard-core processor products.