Built on an optimized low-power process, the Altera / Intel® Cyclone IV device family offers two variants. Cyclone® IV E offers low power, high functionality, and low cost.

Cyclone® IV GX devices offer an on-chip transceiver with an I/Os speed up to 3.125Gbps. This high-speed transceiver supports many serial I/O protocols, such as Gigabit Ethernet (GbE), PCI Express (PCIe), CPRI, XAUI, 3G Triple-Rate SDI, Serial RapidIO®, SATA, DisplayPort, and V-by-One, that are migrating from the cutting edge to the mainstream. Cyclone® IV GX FPGAs also include an embedded PCIe hard IP block that, when utilized by the design engineer, does not use any of the FPGA logic and supports more functionality than many other competing FPGA architectures.