Altera Corp. has unveiled a new FPGA portfolio, targeting intelligent systems, including physical AI at the edge and the digital AI infrastructure. Supported by a unified agentic AI design flow, the new Agilex 2X FPGA and system-on-chip (SoC) portfolio spans high-performance, mid-range, and power- and cost-optimized devices. The first announced family is the Agilex 27 for high-bandwidth, high-throughput systems. "Intelligence is reshaping a lot of what's happening in the electronics industry and it's touching every application," said Lux Joshi, senior director, product management, at Altera Corp. These workloads are evolving faster than ever to meet greater throughput and new functionality demands, and FPGAs are intended for these workload changes, keeping up with the advancements at the hardware level with programmability, he said. FPGAs also provide hardware adaptability, deterministic processing, and high-speed I/Os, making them suited for physical AI applications. The growth of physical AI, which require a much richer set of heterogeneous architectures, is a key driver behind the development of the Agilex 2X family, according to Joshi. For example, robots require heterogeneous architectures that can sense the physical world, process sensor data with low latency, provide high levels of deterministic behavior and functional safety, as well as perform more advanced compute to produce outcomes in the physical world, he explained. The Agilex 2X portfolio (Source: Altera Corp.) Scalability, architecture innovations, and agentic AI The Agilex 2X portfolio comprises four device families-Agilex 27, Agilex 25, Agilex 23, and Agilex 22, each optimized for different power- and-cost performance, depending on the application. This allows customers to prioritize different combinations of connectivity, bandwidth, capacity, power efficiency, and overall performance to meet requirements for different applications, ranging from data centers and digital artificial intelligence infrastructure to communications, aerospace and defense, embedded systems, and physical artificial intelligence. Joshi explained that the three key features of the Agilex 2X portfolio are its scalability, building out multiple product tiers that cover different levels of performance, power efficiency, I/O interfacing, and embedded compute, tailored for different applications; new architectural elements; and a unified agentic AI developer experience based on the QuartusIQ AI Expert Companion. Agilex 2X builds on Altera's fabric architecture with key innovations such as the 3rd Gen HyperFlex Fabric and new HyperFlow data network. These FPGAs are optimized for performance per watt at the application level, as well as scaling performance and capacity at the high end and low power and I/O density at the other end. The new portfolio offers enhanced AI tensor DSP blocks to accelerate compute in signal processing applications, the latest Arm cores, high-bandwidth connectivity to support mainstream and next-generation standards, and end-to-end security for data and system integrity. It shares common security and embedded software foundations, including Arm-based hard processors and Nios V soft processors, post-quantum-cryptography-ready secure boot, and functional-safety practices. The Agilex 2X portfolio is supported by its Quartus Prime software and recently introduced QuartusIQ, which provides an agentic design flow. With these tools, customers can work from common design workflows and reusable IP across every family in the Agilex 2X portfolio, Altera said. QuartusIQ combines smarter design guidance, specialized chat interaction, agentic design flows, and timing-closure assistance to accelerate an end-to-end design flow. This includes an agent runtime harness that preconditions all queries into an AI model. The tool can help both experienced FPGA engineers and developers who would not ordinarily choose an FPGA as their first architecture, Joshi said. Engineers and developers