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A Guide to Storage Processors is now available for immediate delivery. Get up to speed on the latest developments in RAID processors, storage network processors, SAS expanders, and iSCSI target HBAs. Chip Vendors Discuss Metro Ethernet Trends At our recent Metro Ethernet Equipment Design seminar held in San Jose, chip vendors discussed key technology trends in the segment. Multicore was the hot topic for control-plane CPUs. With its 16-CPU Octeon processors, Cavium is gaining real-world experience in how customer applications can scale beyond one or two cores. Freescale, meanwhile, has its powerful MPC8641D dual-core Power processor and hinted that it would disclose additional multicore products later this year. AMCC sees mid-band Ethernet replacing T1/E1 links for many small-to-medium enterprise customers. The company alluded to an unannounced nP32xx NPU designed to address the severe cost constraints of these designs. Exar demonstrated a new reference platform, called Hercules, that combines TDM, Ethernet-over-Sonet, and RPR in a single-board design. Exar noted carriers are quietly deploying RPR over both Sonet/SDH and Ethernet transport, despite a relative dearth of merchant RPR silicon. Overall, metro protocols and requirements remain very dynamic. OAM was a major topic, as multiple new and complementary OAM standards are emerging. There was consensus that OAM will generate a large amount of exception traffic that must be at least partially handled in the fast path. Another challenge is extensions to Ethernet that increasingly position it as an alternative to MPLS. These include MAC-in-MAC protocols, which have carrier-specific flavors, and the emerging traffic-engineered Ethernet core (PBT) that disables spanning tree. For these chip vendors, the good news is that enterprise-class Ethernet switch chips cannot meet the demands of metro designs. —Bob For more details of this event, download the proceedings, including transcripts of the panel discussions, for free at our web site. Program description Proceedings registration Last week, IDT added seven new products to its already broad portfolio of PCI Express (PCIe) switches. The most significant of these is a 64-lane, 16-port PCIe switch. This device is most applicable as a backplane switch in blade servers and other modular applications. The remaining new switch chips enhance earlier products with non-transparent bridging and an additional virtual channel. Positioned as inter-domain PCIe switches, these 2- and 3-port devices target compute blades of a blade server and complement the 16-port backplane switch. All are currently sampling. As of 1Q07, IDT and PLX offer a broad range of PCIe switches. The newest products from each are competitive on power dissipation and latency. The different lane and port configurations allows these devices to address the differing requirements of HBAs, graphics adapters, and NICs. With this announcement, IDT takes the lead by offering the first PCIe switch chip with 64 lanes. IDT's new 64-lane/16-port switch is a little early for blade servers, which currently use a combination of Ethernet, Fibre Channel, and HPC interconnects such as InfiniBand. Nevertheless, this chip, combined with I/O virtualization (IOV) and PCIe Gen 2 enhancements, offers blade-server designers an alternative to Ethernet. Compared to Ethernet plus TCP, PCIe has the potential to reduce end-to-end latency and eliminate the Ethernet controller from the compute blade. With an increasing installed base and 10Gbps performance, however, Ethernet is building a lead that threatens to limit the success of PCIe for blade servers. —Jag Additional coverage of PCIe switch chips from IDT and PLX appears in our report, A Guide to High-Speed Interconnects. Last week, BroadLight announced its BL3458, which will be the first four-port GPON controller when it samples in June 2007. For each of the four GPON controllers, the BL3458 supports downstream data rates of 1.25Gbps and 2.5Gbps, and upstream data rates of 1.25Gbps. Integrated burst-mode CDR and serdes allow direct connection to optical transceivers. For each GPON MAC, the BL3458 provides a 2.5Gbps overclocked SGMII port, which can be connected to an external Ethernet switch chip. Ethernet switch chips that use a 2.5Gbps SGMII interface are available from Marvell, Broadcom, and Fulcrum. For execution of its ITU-T G.984 compliant GPON stack, the BL3458 uses an embedded MIPS CPU that connects directly to external DDR2 DRAM. Each GPON controller can perform classification and provide PON QoS on the basis of Layer 2 or Layer 3 parameters, including 801.1p, and DiffServ code points. BroadLight is the time-to-market leader for GPON controllers. With the BL3458, BroadLight continues to build on its lead by introducing the first quad-port controller. The company has translated its time-to-market advantage into more than 40 design wins. Many of the design wins, however, will take a long time before generating revenue. The company will need to continue to improve its products to stay ahead of larger competitors that are preparing their own GPON products. —Jag Complete coverage of BroadLight's GPON products appears in our report, A Guide to Broadband Interface Chips.
On May 9th, The Linley Group will present a one-day seminar that explores the latest products and technologies for PCI Express, RapidIO, 10G Ethernet, and other leading interconnects. This event will include a session on chip-to-chip interconnects, featuring talks from leading silicon technology suppliers on signal integrity, system design, and switching. It will also address the design challenges of using high-speed interconnects and how different interconnects can be combined in real systems. A second session will focus on recent developments at the physical layer for Ethernet at 10Gbps and beyond. As the industry looks at optical and electrical technologies to meet evolving system requirements, various new standards have been developed, including LRM and 10GBase-T. We'll discuss both, providing you with the information you need in determining the appropriate technologies and products for your designs. The session will also explore system design challenges and ways to address them. This Linley Tech seminar will be held at the DoubleTree Hotel in San Jose. The seminar is intended for OEMs, board developers, software developers, press, and the financial community. Attendance is free to qualified attendees; others pay $495. Mark your calendars and register now at our web site. Full details of the program will be announced in April. This event is sponsored by Freescale, AMCC, Altera, Rambus, Pericom, and The Linley Group. Click here for seminar information. To receive The Linley Wire via e-mail, click here
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