Achronix Semiconductor Corporation

The networking/telecommunication world is continuing its decades-long evolution toward ever-higher data rates, ever-higher traffic volume, a more diverse mix of traffic types, and packet-based protocols, with an overlay of connection-based mechanisms.

These trends lead to the need for increased performance – the type of performance delivered by the Achronix Speedster^® family of FPGAs. All Speedster fabric elements operate at 1.5 GHz.

High-end networking/telecom systems tend to be chassis-based, with multiple linecards linked to one (or two) common switch fabric modules. The linecards connect external traffic – in a multitude of diverse communication formats – to the shared switch fabric. The linecards are performance-hungry, due to the growing throughput of the line interfaces in use today.

Linecards also benefit from configurability, due to the many different standards supported. This combination of needs – high performance and reconfigurability – accounts for the growing use of high-end FPGAs for datapath functions on the linecard. These functions include:

In addition to the datapath processing tasks enabled by Speedster's extremely high-performance fabric, the I/O and SerDes resources available on the Speedster products provide a data throughput matched to the fabric performance. In particular, the SerDes lanes:

• Operate at rates up to 10.375 Gbps
• Support DFE operation over impaired channels such as backplanes
• Support a wide variety of communication standards, including:
  
  
  • 40G/100G Ethernet
  • CEI-6G, both Short Range (SR) and Long Range (LR) (6.375 Gbps)
  • 10 Gbps backplane
  • XFI (10.3125 Gbps)
  • PCI-Express
  • XAUI (3.125 Gbps)
  • Serial RapidIO (2.5, 5 Gbps)
  • Infiniband
  • Gigabit Ethernet (SGMII, 1.25 Gbps)

Similarly, I/Os are high performance and configurable with the following characteristics:

• Operate at rates up to 1.066 Gbps
• Include advanced support structures, such as individual tapped delay lines
• Support a wide variety of communication standards, including:
  
  
  • DDR1/DDR2/DDR3 SDRAM
  • QDRII+
  • SPI-4.2

Certain useful higher-layer functionality is also built into the Speedster devices:

• SerDes PCS support functions (8b/10b, special character recognition, etc.)
• Embedded DDR1/DDR2/DDR3 controllers (up to 72 bits wide)

For these reasons the Speedster FPGAs are ideal platforms for high-performance networking and telecommunication applications.