Virtex-5 TXT Platform Provides FPGA Tool for Building 40 GbE, 100 GbE Telecom Equipment
October 2, 2008 // Published as a news service by IHS
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Xilinx Inc. announced the Virtex-5 TXT single field-programmable gate array (FPGA) device for telecommunications equipment manufacturers developing the next generation in Ethernet bridging and switching products.
Aimed at the 40 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) and 100 GbE market, Xilinx added the new platform to its family of 65 nanometer (nm) FPGAs.
"The explosive growth in Internet traffic for video over IP [Internet protocol] is creating the need to rapidly scale the world's IP infrastructure," said Dean Westman, vice president, communications business at Xilinx.
"This has a direct impact on IP backbone network capacity, individual core router size, router-to-router link bandwidth and the performance of optical transport networks used to carry traffic across wide area networks," he said.
"Virtex-5 TXT FPGAs tackle the challenges these requirements impose on hardware designers by enabling ultra-high bandwidth communications on a power-optimized programmable platform. This is a critical step forward for the telecommunications industry …," Westman said.
The Virtex-5 TXT platform has 48 6.5 Gbps GTX transceivers and is targeted at 100 GbE applications. Xilinx said it is designed to improve signal integrity for reliable operation of 10/100 Gbps links.
It also offers lower power consumption per channel and provides programmable support for multiple protocols, and thus is adaptable to evolving standards for the interface between 100 Gbps optical modules and the media access controller (MAC).
Virtex-5 TXT devices offer a single-chip tool with built-in flexibility and reprogrammability to scale as 40 GbE and 100 GbE hardware requirements and standards mature, while delivering the 600 Gbps total bandwidth required to build network bridges, Xilinx said.
These bridges include:
- 100 GbE to 120 Gbps Interlaken.
- 40 Gbps Quad 10 Gb attachment unit interface (XAUI) to 50 Gbps Interlaken.
- Optical carrier 768 (OC-768) to optical transport unit 3 (OTU-3).
- SERDES framer interface level 5 (SFI-5) to 4xSFI4.2.
- Nontelecommunications applications.
The Virtex-5 TXT platform can also be used for high-performance computing and video broadcast applications.
"The integration of our Ethernet IP solutions on a single Virtex-5 TXT FPGA is a compelling value proposition to enable telecom equipment manufacturers to get to market quickly," said Farhad Shafai, vice president of R&D at Sarance Technologies.
"Hardware developers can reduce their system costs by minimizing components and circuit board area while also meeting power and thermal management targets. Not only does this ease the transition to 100 G[b]E, it means that the wired telecom industry can maximize profits from the deployment of the next-generation multimedia infrastructure," Shafai said.
The Virtex-5 TX150T and Virtex-5 TX240T devices will begin sampling by the end of calendar 2008 with production devices available in 1Q 2009.
Source: Xilinx Inc.