Altera's Arria II GX

Enabling Ethernet-Over-NG-SONET/SDH Solutions for MSPP Linecards

Traditionally, the development of application-specific chip products such as ASSPs is based on foundry manufacturing, either in-house or via commercial foundries. FPGAs also are based on this manufacturing process, but due to their broader and more generic application, the production volume that FPGAs attain justifies investment in the latest manufacturing processes and technology. In turn, this benefits the designer with lower power consumption and greater integration resulting in a lower cost per logic unit.

One company taking advantage of the power, cost, and integration benefits of FPGAs is TPACK. TPACK provides application-specific chip products based on FPGAs. This approach, called SOFTSILICON, uses the latest generation of Altera ® FPGAs to provide efficient packet-processing, traffic-management, and packet-mapping chip solutions to
telecom system vendors.

This white paper shows how TPACK uses Altera’s Arria® II GX FPGAs to offer new SOFTSILICON products for carrier-Ethernet-transport and packet-transport applications. Designed for cost-sensitive applications, Arria II GX FPGAs are the lowest power FPGAs with up to 3.75-Gbps transceivers. This allows TPACK to deliver solutions superior to traditional ASSP products in terms of power, cost, and features.

Download the entire white paper below