How to make business-related inquiries of Altera?

A lot of the time the field office personal are out visting customers, so that may be the reason you are only getting voice mail.

You can also try going to Arrow, they are an Altera distributor, and I know they have ASIC design services specifically for hardcopy. If you are currently using Altera FPGA's your current supplier of the FPGA's should be able to set up a business meeting to discuss your hardcopy requirements.

The closest Arrow I could find near Washington DC is:

Arrow North American Components - Philadelphia

355 Business Center Drive

Horsham, PA 19044

Phone#: (215) 956-4800

Fax#: (215) 675-9875

My previous experience with hardcopy, is it's very similar to a standard ASIC flow, in that it's not a "one button" push from the FPGA flow to the ASIC, but that there are differences between the FPGA and ASIC that still have to be resolved.

Altera/Arrow worked with us through those differences, and from what I understand, this is easier or more difficult depending on the exact FPGA to Hardcopy flow you are running.

(Our issue was with a PLL in the Hardcopy that had a "Dead" spot for a certain input frequency that worked on the FPGA PLL, that we had to work around. But it was identified by Altera before silicon, so the work around worked with no problems.)

Pete

P.S. I do not work for either Altera or Arrow. I'm a FPGA/ASIC consultant.

Thanks for the recommendation, Pete. I will call Arrow in the morning. Although we buy limited numbers of FPGAs from distributors like Digikey, I always figured we'd be dealing directly with Altera when it came to having custom sASICs made for us.

The design we're working with is pretty straightforward, but uses a lot of H-Cells. I'm assuming as part of the NRE cost that an Altera engineer will look over the design and point out potential issues before silicon. Naturally we're preparing a scaled-down version of the full design for testing on a Stratix IV first.

Yeah, I don't know exactly how the model works, but that's how it worked on the last Hardcopy I worked on.

I'm going through some old emails, I have found a couple of contacts emails/phone numbers I have that may help you out as well.

I'll direct message you those.

Pete

Actually if you are in the Washington DC area you need to contact the Arrow Office in Columbia, MD.

Arrow North American Components - Baltimore

7067 Columbia Gateway Drive

Suite 170

Columbia, MD 21046

Phone#: (410) 312-4600

Fax#: (410) 312-4640