FPGA platforms enable OTN solutions for 400G and beyond

11th March 2014

Altera Europe

Staff Reporter

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Two SoftSilicon FPGA platforms, which provide optical equipment manufacturers with standards-based OTN solutions beyond 100 Gigabit/s (B100G), has been announced by Altera. The platforms feature an FPGA in combination with a fully integrated IP solution that reduces design time, integration processes and test phases, allowing customers to focus more on value-add technology differentiation.

The new products are the Altera SoftSilicon 400G Transponder/Muxponder (TPO516) and the Altera SoftSilicon single-chip 20-channel any-rate mapper with segmentation and reassembly (SAR) (TPOC226), which can be applied in advanced ODU cross-connect systems for OTN-based transport networks. The products, which are the industry’s first fully-integrated 200G and 400G OTN solutions, will enable equipment manufacturers to streamline their development efforts as they move towards high-capacity transport.

OFC attendees can visit the Altera booth (# 4453) for more information about market-leading OTN solutions that can help them achieve 400G and 1Tb throughput in a single device and migrate from 28 nm to 20 nm and 14 nm technologies.

With these new products, optimized for Arria 10 and Stratix 10 FPGAs and SoCs, Altera will offer a full portfolio capable of meeting the complex technical requirements of 400G and 1Tb OTN applications. These new and future offerings will be delivered on the advanced Intel 14 nm Tri-Gate process, optimizing time-to-market with leading edge solutions, while maintaining a low-risk and cost-effective profile.

The Altera SoftSilicon portfolio of FPGA platforms for OTN, with standard devices and a well-defined set of features, pin-out and software API validated on reference hardware, guarantees shortest time-to-market. Because SoftSilicon devices have been built and validated on reference platforms that closely resemble the target application, they minimize the development risk for system providers. The FPGA platforms also mitigate the risk from new or changing requirements from end-customers or standardization bodies.

Low Development and Maintenance Cost

Altera provides an easy-to-use unified software API for the various solutions. This makes it efficient for software teams to integrate their solutions into the system software and makes software maintenance much easier, particularly if hardware solutions are migrated to more integrated implementations and new process nodes over time.

“The escalating cost of smaller semiconductor process geometries has made the economics of building OTN ASSPs unattractive, due to the limited volumes in the optical market,” said Scott Bibaud, senior vice president of the Communications and Broadcast business unit, Altera. “Our latest SoftSilicon products, based on Arria 10 FPGAs, bring customers leading-edge process technology and superior power and performance advancements that will address their challenges while offering them the flexibility to differentiate.”

The Altera SoftSilicon TPOC226 and TPO516 solutions are available now for customer design consideration.