The low-cost Cyclone III FPGA family is the third generation in the Altera® Cyclone series. The unmatched combination of low power, high functionality, and low cost broadens the number of high-volume, cost-sensitive applications that can benefit from FPGAs.

Cyclone III devices are manufactured on 300-mm wafers using TSMC’s 65-nm (nine metal layers, all copper) low-power (LP) process technology, designed for low dynamic and leakage power.

The Cyclone III family is comprised of eight devices ranging from 5K to 120K logic elements (LEs) and up to 535 user I/O pins. Cyclone III devices offer up to 4-Mbit of embedded memory, 288 embedded 18-bit x 18-bit multipliers, dedicated external memory interface circuitry, phase-locked loops (PLLs), and high-speed differential I/O capabilities. A broad range of devices and package options support a wide variety of cost-sensitive high-volume applications.

Cyclone III FPGAs are perfectly suited as embedded processors or microcontrollers when combined with Altera's 32-bit Nios® II embedded processor intellectual property (IP) cores. You can add many other functions to the Cyclone III FPGA with additional IP cores available from Altera and Altera's partners.

Quartus® II is the industry's only complete design solution for CPLDs, FPGAs, and structured ASICs. Quartus II software includes an integrated development environment to accelerate system-level design and seamless integration with leading third-party software tools and flows. Cyclone III FPGAs are supported by both the subscription and free Quartus II Web Edition software with the Quartus II 7.0 version (except EP3C5 which will be enabled in version 7.1).

Altera also offers customers a low-cost development kit DK-START-3C25N, proven intellectual property cores, and application-specific reference designs.

Related Links 

Altera Cyclone III Homepage 
Cyclone III FPGA Starter Kit