Agilex™ 3: Inside Altera’s Cost-Optimized FPGA Architecture

If you’ve been following along, you’ll know we've explored the Altera Agilex 7, especially its high-speed memory performance. But what happens when your project still needs performance, but is also constrained by cost, space, or power?

Enter the Agilex 3.

Over the next few weeks, I'm excited to take you on a deep dive into this versatile and efficient FPGA family. Agilex 3 is built for the exact purpose of bringing modern FPGA architecture to applications where every millimetre and every dollar counts.

What's Under the Hood?

These devices are optimised for performance in compact systems, giving developers a fantastic toolkit to work with:

• Logic Density: From 25K to 135K Logic Elements—plenty of room for our custom logic, control systems, or signal processing chains.

• DSP Power: Up to 368 multipliers, perfect for accelerating math-intensive tasks like filtering or FFTs. These are also capable of operating in a AI Tensor block mode providing dot products.

• High-Speed I/O: Four transceivers running up to 12.5 Gbps, allowing you to connect to cameras, networks, or high-speed sensors.

• Modern Connectivity: Support for PCIe Gen 3 and LPDDR4 memory.

All of this is built on the same second-generation Hyperflex Architecture found in its bigger siblings, and you can develop for it using a no-cost license in Quartus Prime Pro.

Our Board for this Adventure: The Terasic Atum A3 Nano

Regular readers will know I'm a big believer in learning by doing, so I’ve got my hands on the perfect board for this series: the Terasic Atum A3 Nano. It features the largest Agilex 3 device (135K LEs) and comes with everything we need to take a look at the architecture:

• Gigabit Ethernet and HDMI Output

• 64 MB of SDRAM

• Switches, buttons, and LEDs for user interaction

• GPIO and TMD (Pmod-compatible) headers for expansion

Don't Forget Other Flavours!

While we'll be using the Atum A3, the Agilex 3 ecosystem is growing. For ultra-compact projects, there's the Arrow AXC3000 in an Arduino MKR form factor. If you want to accelerate your product development, the iWave Agilex 3 SoM is a fantastic choice that reduces risk and gets you to market faster a strategy I'm a huge advocate for.

What's Next?

In the next post, we will hit the ground running with the Atum A3 Nano, get the tools set up, and run our very first "hello world" design.

UK FPGA Conference

FPGA Horizons - October 7th 2025 - THE FPGA Conference, find out more here.

Sponsored by Altera