FPGA Solutions for Military, Aerospace, and Government Applications
Explore how cutting-edge high-performance FPGAs provide the flexibility, performance, and productivity to support the future of Military, Aerospace, and Government (MAG) applications.
Advancing Next-Gen Solutions with High-Performance FPGAs
High-performance FPGAs (Field-Programmable Gate Arrays) have become pivotal in advancing military technology, offering unparalleled capabilities for defense applications. As military operations increasingly rely on real-time data processing, secure communications, and sophisticated signal processing, FPGAs provide a flexible, high-performance, and long lifecycle solution. These versatile semiconductor components can be reconfigured to meet evolving needs, enabling rapid adaptation to emerging threats and complex scenarios. With their ability to handle high-speed computations and integrate with various systems, high-performance FPGAs are at the forefront of enhancing operational effectiveness, ensuring robust security, and supporting next-generation military technologies.
Benefits of Using FPGAs in MAG Applications
Real-Time Adaptability
FPGAs are reprogrammable after deployment, allowing military and defense systems to swiftly adapt to changing operational requirements, emerging threats, and new protocols. This flexibility doesn't need hardware replacement.
Superior Hardware Level Security
FPGAs provide built-in encryption and tamper-resistance, making them a highly secure option for safeguarding sensitive data and classified information in military, government, and aerospace applications. Their flexibility allows for the implementation of custom security protocols, ensuring protection against evolving cyber threats.
Performance and Power Efficiency
FPGAs can handle high-bandwidth, compute-intensive tasks such as radar processing, communication encryption, and signal intelligence while maintaining low power consumption. This balance of power efficiency and high performance is especially beneficial in aerospace and defense systems, where energy resources are often limited, and mission longevity is crucial.
System Longevity and Flexibility
FPGAs can be reprogrammed and upgraded without requiring full hardware replacements, making them cost-effective for long-term military and defense use. Their versatility ensures that defense systems can evolve with technology advancements and mission requirements, reducing the frequency and cost of hardware obsolescence.
Radar and Electronic Warfare
The integration of FPGAs in radar and electronic warfare (EW) systems delivers unmatched performance, adaptability, real-time processing, and scalability. These capabilities enable systems to meet growing data demands, respond to electronic threats with precision, and ensure reliability in demanding environments.
Radar technology is essential for defense, surveillance, and navigation, but increasing data demands, adaptability requirements, and environmental challenges push system designs to the limit.
FPGAs provide unmatched performance by integrating high-speed data converters, advanced signal processing blocks, and scalable resources into compact, efficient packages. One customer shared that using Altera’s Agilex™ 9 Direct RF FPGAs and SoCs helped to ‘shrink a refrigerator-sized piece of equipment down to a Rubik Cube’. These capabilities enable radar systems to handle growing bandwidth requirements, perform digital beamforming, and track multiple targets in real time—all while maintaining reliability in demanding environments.
Engineered for long-term durability, FPGAs adapt seamlessly to evolving mission needs, ensuring radar systems remain robust, efficient, and ready for the future.
Electronic Warfare (EW) is central to modern defense, requiring rapid adaptability and precision to address the increasing complexity of electronic threats. High bandwidth demands, frequency agility, and ultra-low latency are among the key challenges designers face in developing effective EW systems.
FPGAs offer unmatched flexibility and performance, enabling EW systems to manage high bandwidths, adapt across frequency ranges, and respond to threats in real time. By integrating advanced signal processing and reconfigurable resources into compact, efficient designs, FPGAs deliver the adaptability and speed essential for real-time responsiveness.
Design Examples
Direct RF-Series FPGA Evaluation Platform Demo
Learn about the Direct RF-Series FPGA Evaluation Platform while gaining a brief market overview and using the platform to show three RF performance sweeps: ADC noise spectral density, ADC spurious free dynamic range, and DAC intermodulation distortion.
| Tools | |
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| Quartus® Prime Software Suite | A complete suite of development tools for every stage of your design for Altera® FPGAs, CPLDs, and SoC FPGAs for Hardware Developers and System Architects. |
| Direct RF Design Suite | Development Tools specifically for Agilex™ 9 FPGA and SoC Direct RF Development Platfform, and Design Examples. Contact Altera Sales for more details. |
| DSP Builder | Simplifies the creation of signal processing architectures, accelerating FPGA design workflows. |
Provides machine learning tools for advanced radar capabilities such as target classification and optimization. |
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Provide optimized floating-point arithmetic for FPGAs, enabling precise computations for advanced Radar and EW applications. |
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Supports both integer and floating-point operations, allowing flexibility for various radar and AI applications. For other Altera® FPGA families, please see the Variable Precision DSP Block section of the Device Overview and Datasheet. |
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Direct RF design example and demo page to help jumpstart the design process. |
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BAE Systems
Intel and DOD Deliver SHIP Program Prototypes to BAE Six Quarters Ahead of Schedule.
Lockheed Martin
SWIFT Demonstration Highlights the Future of EW and Microelectronics.
Secure Communications
FPGAs in secure communication systems enable secure data handling, robust encryption, and independent task operation, ensuring reliability in harsh environments while shaping the future of mission-critical defense applications.
Secure communications demand adaptability, reliability, and efficiency under strict SWaP (size, weight, and power) constraints. To address these demands, FPGAs enable software-defined waveforms, advanced signal processing, and low-latency multi-channel data handling.
Strict logic separation ensures encrypted and unencrypted data protection, while hardened cryptographic services, including cryptographic blocks and key management subsystems, provide secure encryption, authentication, and compliance with military standards.
With multiple processors, FPGAs enable independent task operation and reduce SWaP burdens through compact, efficient designs. They incorporate anti-tamper features and resilience in harsh conditions, delivering reliable performance, making them indispensable for UAVs, naval systems, and other mission-critical applications.
Others
- Design Separation (Design Example)
- Altera’s Security Methodology User Guide (RDC ID# 724441). Access to this document requires a Non-Disclosure Agreement. Please contact Altera® Sales to gain access to this and other confidential Security-related documents.
Aerospace & Avionics
FPGAs in avionics ensure precise, reliable performance, supporting real-time sensor data processing, adaptive flight controls, and compliance with safety standards like DO-254.
In aerospace and avionics, where safety and precision are critical, FPGAs provide unparalleled reliability, efficiency, and adaptability. They enable compliance with rigorous safety standards like DO-254 by supporting redundant, independent processing paths for safety-critical functions, such as real-time sensor data processing in avionics systems.
Optimized for power efficiency, FPGAs are ideal for compact, weight-sensitive applications. Their reconfigurable design powers adaptive flight control systems, allowing real-time updates and seamless integration of new requirements without hardware redesigns. With these capabilities, FPGAs enhance system reliability, reduce power consumption, and keep organizations at the forefront of aerospace innovation.
| Tools | |
|---|---|
| Quartus® Prime Software Suite | A complete suite of development tools for every stage of your design for Altera® FPGAs, CPLDs, and SoC FPGAs for Hardware Developers and System Architects. |
| FPGA AI Suite | Enables FPGA designs, machine learning engineers, and software developers to create optimized FPGA AI platforms efficiently. |
| Video Vision Processing Suite | Collection of next-generation FPGA IP that can be used to facilitate the development of custom video and image processing designs. |
| DSP Builder | Helps with the design of digital signal processing (DSP) applications on FPGAs. |
Government Analytics & High-Performance Compute
Parallel processing, energy efficiency, and real-time performance make FPGAs essential in Government Analytics and HPC applications. They optimize tasks like disk compression and floating-point computations, enhancing scalability and reducing hardware footprints for cost-effective, high-performance systems.
In a data-driven world, government agencies face the dual challenge of managing massive datasets while achieving cost efficiency and performance gains.
FPGAs provide a versatile solution, boosting performance through parallel processing and optimizing data restructuring for faster searches and retrievals. For example, leveraging FPGAs for disk compression and erasure encoding can reduce RAID redundancy, cutting hard drives from 10 to 6, significantly lowering costs. Tools like Apache Arrow and Pulsar further utilize FPGAs to streamline unstructured data processing, enabling quick access to critical information.
By delivering speed, scalability, and minimized hardware footprints, FPGAs help agencies meet current demands and adapt to evolving technological needs.
In the evolving landscape of High-Performance Computing (HPC), FPGAs are redefining complex simulations and large-scale data processing with superior power efficiency and customizability.
FPGAs excel in power-sensitive applications, delivering high performance at lower energy costs in tasks like radio telescopes and large-scale simulations. Their tailored designs optimize repetitive workloads, such as floating-point computations and real-time weather analysis, driving faster decisions and improved accuracy.
By enhancing memory bandwidth and parallel processing, FPGAs outperform conventional solutions, enabling organizations to achieve peak performance and energy efficiency as HPC demands grow.
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SHIP (State-of-the-Art Heterogenous Integrated Packaging Program)
The U.S. Department of Defense awarded Altera® a contract to ensure U.S. access to state-of-the-art microelectronics packaging. The SHIP Program supports the advancement of domestic semiconductor manufacturing and packaging capabilities, providing DoD and DIBs with a diversified supply chain and IP protection while supporting U.S. Semiconductor research and development.