Today at the International Microwave Symposium (IMS2026), Altera Corporation, the industry's largest pure-play FPGA solutions provider, announced engineering sample availability of its next-generation wideband Agilex 9 Direct RF-Series SoC FPGAs. Designed to meet the growing demands for performance, integration, and adaptability in aerospace, defence, and advanced communications systems, the latest addition to Altera's Direct RF portfolio delivers a 40% increase in compute capability per square millimetre.

Altera announced engineering samples of its next-generation wideband Agilex 9 Direct RF-Series FPGAs. Designed for aerospace, defence, and advanced communications, the devices integrate RF, compute, and memory in a single platform.

As next-generation RF systems grow more complex, engineers face increasing pressure to process wider bandwidths, respond in real time, and deliver greater capabilities within tight size, weight, power, and latency constraints. Altera's Agilex 9 Direct RF-Series SoC FPGAs address these challenges by enabling developers to process and analyse RF signals closer to the edge while adapting to evolving mission requirements.

Agilex 9 Direct RF-Series SoC FPGAs deliver a tightly integrated architecture that combines high-speed data converters, programmable logic, and processing elements into a single package. This enables developers building next-generation wideband RF systems to reduce complexity, manage power, and meet real-time performance demands where latency and responsiveness are critical.

"Across aerospace, defence, and advanced communications, our customers are being asked to handle more data and operate within tighter constraints," said John Sotir, General Manager of Altera's Aerospace, Defence and Government business unit. "With our latest Agilex 9 Direct RF device, we're helping them meet those challenges by bringing together high-performance compute, memory, and RF capabilities into a single, highly integrated platform."

Building on Altera's proven Direct RF portfolio, the new Agilex 9 device delivers 45% greater logic and DSP density compared to the previous generation, along with support for next-generation DDR5 and LPDDR5 memory technologies. With integrated 64Gsps wideband RF, and higher compute and memory resources, the programmable solution eliminates the need for multi-chip designs while enabling more advanced beamforming for radar and data cube processing. The highly integrated RF platform supports high-bandwidth signal capture and generation, allowing customers to scale performance while maintaining the flexibility to evolve their designs over time.

Ian Dunn, CTO at Spectrum Control, an Altera board partner, stated, "As RF systems become more complex and bandwidth demands continue to grow, integration and performance at the system level are critical. Altera's newest Agilex 9 Direct RF-Series SoC FPGA enables us to simplify system architectures while delivering the high-performance signal processing our customers require. The combination of integrated RF, compute, and memory helps us accelerate development and bring more capable solutions to market faster."