Altera shipping 14.1 Gbps backplane-capable transceivers in 28-nm Stratix V FPGAs

The folks from Altera Corporation have just announced that they are shipping in volume production the FPGA industry’s highest performance backplane-capable transceivers.

Altera’s Stratix V FPGAs are said to be the industry’s only FPGAs to offer backplane-capable 14.1 Gbps transceiver bandwidth and are the only FPGAs capable of supporting the latest generation of the Fibre Channel protocol (16GFC).

Developers of backplanes, switches, data centers, cloud computing applications, test and measurement systems and storage area networks can achieve significantly higher data rate speeds as well as rapid storage and retrieval of information by leveraging Altera’s latest generation 28-nm high-performance FPGA. For OTN (optical transport network) applications, Stratix V FPGAs allow carriers to scale quickly to support the tremendous growth of traffic on their networks.

Altera started shipping engineering samples of 28-nm FPGAs featuring integrated 14.1 Gbps transceivers over one year ago. These high-performance devices are the latest in Altera’s 28-nm FPGA portfolio to ship in volume production.

The transceivers in Stratix V GX and Stratix V GS FPGAs deliver high system bandwidth (up to 66 lanes operating up to 14.1 Gbps) at the lowest power consumption (under 200 mW per channel). Transceivers in Altera’s FPGAs are equipped with advanced equalization circuit blocks, including low-power CTLE (continuous time linear equalization), DFE (decision feedback equalization), and a variety of other signal conditioning features for optimal signal integrity to support backplane, optical module, and chip-to-chip applications. This advanced signal conditioning circuitry enables direct drive of 10GBASE-KR backplanes using Stratix V FPGAs.


“Developers of next-generation protocols need to leverage the latest test equipment that integrates the latest technologies,” said Michael Romm, vice president of product development, at LeCroy Protocol Solutions Group, a leading manufacturer of test and measurement equipment. “Altera’s latest family of 28-nm FPGAs gives us the capability to build the most sophisticated and advanced test equipment so our customers can rapidly develop and bring to market their next-generation systems.”

Stratix V FPGAs in data centers and storage area networks
Stratix V FPGAs are the only FPGAs to support the latest version of the Fibre Channel protocol, 16GFC. Stratix V FPGAs are ideally suited for large-scale, storage-intensive systems by simplifying the interconnection of different components in the data center or storage area network. The FPGA’s built-in 14.1-Gbps transceivers provide a dedicated mode for implementing the XAUI interface that is available for 16GFC, enabling the efficient implementation of the entire interface in a single device.

Evolving optical transport networks with Stratix V FPGAs
The backbone of next-generation optical transport is evolving rapidly to support a variety of high data rate applications (voice, video, storage). Stratix V FPGAs are enabling this evolution by supporting the widest range of transceiver data rate speeds, up to 28 Gbps in the Stratix V GT family. Stratix V FPGAs combined with Altera’s IP portfolio is capable of supporting multiple 100G OTN links on a single device that scales from OTU2 through OTU4 and supports ODU multiplexing including ODU0 and ODUFlex.

“Stratix V FPGAs provide an excellent implementation vehicle for next-generation switch fabric architectures due to their flexibility and reliable integrated serial links that enable the fastest backplane speeds with numerous coding and FEC options, and support for standards such as 10GBASE-KR," said Patrick Dorsey, senior director of component product marketing at Altera. "As the only FPGA vendor to offer devices today with integrated 14.1 Gbps capable transceivers, Altera is leading the industry in enabling the deployment of 10G, 40G, and 100G+ platforms.”

About the transceivers in 28-nm Stratix V FPGAs
The transceivers integrated in Stratix V FPGAs include on-die instrumentation, low-jitter LC transmit PLLs (phase-locked loops), robust analog receive CDR (clock data recovery), and advanced transmit and receive equalization providing flexibility for a wide range of applications. Altera’s Stratix V GT FPGAs also feature the industry’s only 28-Gbps transceiver integrated in a single-chip, monolithic die. The transceivers featured in Stratix V FPGAs feature a full-featured physical coding sublayer (PCS) including, support for PCI Express Gen1/2/3, support for 40G and 100G datapath and extensive IP (intellectual property) library of industry-standard transceiver protocols.

Availability
Production Altera's Stratix V FPGAs are available today. For additional information about the devices, visit www.altera.com/stratix5. For pricing contact your local Altera sales representative.

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