Editor: Linley
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If you missed last week’s Linley Tech seminar on high-speed interconnect, don’t despair! Click here to download a free copy of the proceedings, featuring presentations from The Linley Group, Freescale, AMCC, Tundra, Pericom, Xilinx, Teranetics, and ClariPhy. For more in-depth information, get A Guide to High-Speed Interconnects, now available for immediate delivery. Get the scoop on all the products in this category. For more information, visit our web site. Altera Announces the First 40nm FPGA This week, Altera announced Stratix IV, the first FPGA developed in 40nm technology. Using this finer pitch process technology, Altera has more than doubled the density of its FPGA products and now offers high-performance FPGAs with more than twice the number of logic elements (LE) than arch-rival Xilinx offers. Stratix IV provides up to 680,000 LEs and up to 22Mbits of RAM. Stratix IV comes in two variants. The E version adds up to 1,360 18-bit multipliers for DSP-intensive applications. The GX version integrates up to 48 high-speed transceivers operating at up to 8.5Gbps. Stratix IV GX offers the fastest FPGA-based transceivers and the most high-speed (6Gbps or greater) transceivers available on an FPGA. These FPGAs can be programmed for popular high-speed protocols such as RapidIO, XAUI, CPRI, CEI-6G, Interlaken and 10G Ethernet. Stratix IV also includes hard IP for PCI Express 1.0 and for PCI Express 2.0. Altera's Hardcopy process enables Stratix IV customers to convert their FPGA designs to lower-cost ASICs. Altera provides Quartus II software for the development of both FPGA and ASIC designs, simplifying the migration. Hardcopy IV has increased gate count from 3.6 million on 90nm to 13.3 million on 40nm process technology. Unlike the previous version, Hardcopy IV integrates the transceivers as well as the FPGA logic. Compared to developing standard-cell ASICs, Hardcopy provides significantly lower development cost, reduced risk, and faster time to silicon. Altera plans to sample Stratix IV in 4Q08 and to support Hardcopy IV tapeouts by 3Q09. When the company delivers these capabilities of massive density and significant development-cost reduction, it could mark a new way of developing ASICs for smaller semiconductor vendors and OEMs. Such a change would enable smaller companies to afford development on leading-edge process technology. —Jag Additional coverage of Altera's Stratix IV appears in our new report A Guide to High-Speed Interconnects. Earlier this month, Clearwire LLC, Sprint Nextel, and a group of investors including Intel, Google, and three cable operators joined to create Clearwire 2.0. The new U.S.-based company will be the largest WiMax operator in the world. Clearwire and Sprint had a previous partnership based on their complementary geographic footprints, but that had unwound in 2007. Cable operators and Sprint also had a partnership allowing the cable companies to resell Sprint's wireless service, but this, too, had fallen apart. The Sprint-Nextel merger has gone poorly, and the company has been under pressure to trim costs. Investors had been calling for Sprint to terminate WiMax development, but instead Sprint contributed assets and cash to form the new WiMax company. Using OFDM, WiMax is a 4G wireless access technology, much like LTE, which most major telcos worldwide plan to support. As such, the new Clearwire will compete headlong with the leading U.S. wireless service providers, AT&T and Verizon, both of which have committed to LTE. These competitors have the advantages of incumbency with customers, broad support among OEMs for LTE, and an existing infrastructure. They also own lower-frequency spectrum, which will penetrate buildings better than the 2.5GHz spectrum held by Clearwire. WiMax has some advantages. Clearwire's deployment appears to be two years ahead of LTE's. To reduce cost and minimize deployment time, the company is mainly using Ethernet-over-microwave for backhaul. Existing wireless providers must upgrade their backhaul for LTE; trunked T1 lines, which predominate today, have far too little capacity for a 4G network. Clearwire also has the support of Intel, which can do is pressure PC makers to include WiMax in their laptops. The number of PCs sold annually is dwarfed by handset sales, but PC-based data services are the leading adopters of high-speed wireless data. Intel and Google want customers to have access to a disintermediated Internet, much like they have at home and unlike the carefully controlled service telcos want to provide. The cable companies believe they need a wireless service to compete with the telcos. Consumers will decide on the basis of what they get for their money. Already paying for cellular and wireline Internet service, most will not want to shell out much more money for yet another service. Fortunately for them, a showdown between the backers of WiMax and those of LTE, each with a different approach to service and user equipment, could lead to ubiquitous wireless broadband becoming surprisingly affordable. —Joe Last week, signal-integrity specialist Pericom introduced the industry's first redriver for PCI Express 2.0, as well as crystal oscillators for PCI Express 2.0. The redrivers improve signal quality through electrically poor channels. The PI2EQX5804/64 redrivers enable long traces (30 inches) in FR4 material as well as permitting PCIe 2.0 over the backplane. Each device supports 4 lanes of serial PCIe 2.0 data at 5Gbps. These devices include programmable equalizer for the received signals and programmable de-emphasis and amplitude for the transmit signal. The crystal oscillators meet the stringent jitter requirements for PCIe 2.0 and offer a differential output for a simplified interface. Both product lines are available in production quantities. --Jag Last month, Rambus announced that it had licensed its serdes technology to IBM. Rambus has ported the serdes to IBM's 45nm process technology, which will also be offered by foundries Chartered and SMIC. The Rambus serdes core supports data rates of 1.25Gbps to 6.4Gbps. The core is characterized by a small die area, low cost, and low jitter over its operating data rate. Although IBM has internal serdes technology, it licensed the Rambus cores for low power and proven performance. —Jag Additional coverage of Pericom and Rambus appears in our new report A Guide to High-Speed Interconnects.
Security-equipment and software vendors face increasing requirements from their customers who need intrusion detection and prevention from ever-increasing threats. In most cases, standard processors alone can no longer deliver the required performance in a cost-effective and power-efficient manner. To meet these challenges, a new breed of processors is taking integration to the next level by integrating one or more CPUs, memory and I/O controllers, and special-purpose engines for security functions. Security-equipment vendors must balance scaling the performance of their VPN/firewall products with adding application-level features. At the same time, security-software vendors are turning to hardware-accelerated appliances for intrusion prevention (IDS/IPS), antivirus, antispam, and content filtering to satisfy enterprise customers. The convergence of these hardware and software products is creating Unified Threat Management (UTM) platforms designed to meet the most demanding processing requirements. A Guide to Security Processors and Accelerators covers processors that integrate high-throughput encryption, such as Cavium's Octeon, RMI's XLR/XLS, Freescale’s MPC8572, and Intel's Tolapai. We also cover unique processors from Netronome and Tilera, which integrate 40 or more cores and target network-security applications. In addition, the report examines vendors developing content-inspection accelerators: LSI (Tarari), NetLogic, and cPacket. Finally, we cover IPSec and SSL accelerators from Broadcom, Cavium, Hifn, and SafeNet. With one report, you can quickly compare the key vendors and their products and accelerate your selection process. The report analyzes each vendor and each product, probing their strengths and weaknesses and presenting key details in a consistent, easy to compare fashion. For example, we have sorted through various performance claims to put all the security processors on a level playing field, showing who can deliver real system throughput. We also tell you who is really delivering on packet processing claims and who is just delivering marketing hype. Order by June 20 to take advantage of the prepublication price. For further details, visit our web site.
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