Xilinx Establishes Industry-Leading Communications Portfolio for 100G and Beyond Line-cards with the Acquisition of Sarance Technologies

The latest acquisition follows the recent additions of Omiino Ltd. and Modelware to Xilinx's overall strategic portfolio to provide major customers with a 'one-stop-shop' for wired communications logic IC needs, including optical transport, traffic management, packet processing and high-speed Ethernet (Interlaken, MACs and High-Bandwidth Bridge) solutions. The acquisitions give Xilinx a complete portfolio to address service provider, enterprise, and datacenter logic IC needs.

The insatiable global demand for bandwidth is drastically increasing constraints on network infrastructures and operators. Customers are increasing line card bandwidths well into the 200 Gbps to 400 Gbps and leading Ethernet MAC and Scalable Interlaken solutions are key for enabling FPGAs to play a central role in these applications, said Krishna Rangasayee Corporate Vice President & General Manager, Xilinx Communications Business Unit. Sarance's expertise and portfolio is recognized throughout the industry. Bringing the MAC and Interlaken market leader into our fold gives Xilinx the ability to increase and accelerate the displacement of ASSPs and ASICs in many 40G/100G and beyond programs.

One of the three founders of the Interlaken Alliance, Sarance has led the industry with solutions consisting of very configurable, highly-FPGA-optimized portfolio of chip-to-chip interconnect focused on the Ethernet, Interlaken, and the Network Search Engine market segments. They also have the only IP technology capable of scaling to 400G rates for bridging in an FPGA. Their IP along with Virtex® FPGAs has allowed Xilinx to present optimized solutions to customers where many competitive alternatives require larger or non-optimized solutions that force compromises on features and performance.

Ethernet and Interlaken applications are pervasive in communications equipment in both legacy and growth segments and we expect that adoption to continue along with the need to address the other aspects of the communications market, said Bob Wheeler, The Linley Group's senior analyst for networking silicon. Sarance is recognized as the leading supplier of Interlaken IP and a leading supplier of Ethernet IP to the entire logic IC landscape and their technology further strengthens Xilinx's ability to serve the communications market with complete solutions.