i/oZONE Products for the week of March 8, 2004
Cavium Networks Says…
Super Glue -- Cavium's SPI Bridge Processor Family
Connects SPI3/4.2, & PCI/PCI-X Elements In Enterprise and Service Provider
Apps
Cavium Networks has introduced the GOLDEN GATE SPI Bridge Processor
family, the first family of Bridge Processors in the industry designed to
provide bridging between devices with SPI3, SPI4.2 and PCI/PCI-X interfaces.
Cavium's Bridge Processors offer significantly richer functionality at line-rates,
faster time-to-market and require lower power consumption compared to FPGA-based
alternatives. Each device is available in transparent and intelligent options.
Cavium's intelligent bridge processors offer rich packet-manipulation capabilities
in addition to interface bridging. The GOLDEN GATE SPI Bridge Processor
family interconnects devices with disparate interfaces in a wide range of
multi-gigabit networking equipment such as routers, switches, DSLAMs, wireless
infrastructure equipment, web-servers, server load balancers, firewalls,
SANs, and VPN gateways.
GOLDEN GATE SPI Bridge Processors Increases Connectivity between Devices
SPI-3, SPI4.2 and PCI-X are popular interfaces for a wide range of communication
silicon including control-plane processors, network processors, security
processors, traffic managers, switch fabrics, x86 chip-sets, media access
controllers (MACs) and framers. System designers that want to use silicon
components with these disparate interfaces have previously had to develop
FPGA-based connectivity solutions themselves. Cavium's GOLDEN GATE SPI Bridge
Processor family is designed to provide a fast, cost effective, feature-rich,
off-the-shelf and intelligent solution to bridge between devices with SPI-3,
SPI4.2, PCI and PCI-X interfaces.
"We chose Cavium's GOLDEN GATE SPI Bridge processor chip because it enabled us fast time to market for Astute Networks' SuperHBA Accelerators for multi-gigabit iSCSI and TCP offload," said Roger Moyers, COO of Astute Networks. "This allowed us to easily bridge Astute's Pericles Intelligent Protocol Processor with its SPI-4 interface to both a multi-port gigabit Ethernet MAC and the industry-standard PCI-X interface. Cavium offered the only off-the-shelf component which met our requirements."
Broad product line for enterprise and service-provider equipment
The GOLDEN GATE SPI Bridge Processor family has five members to target a
wide range of interface combinations, allowing OEMs to connect various devices
in a variety of enterprise and service provider equipment. All five parts
are available in "transparent" and "intelligent" versions
and include large on-chip buffer that eliminates the need for external memory.
Intelligent versions of the bridge processors allow for packet processing,
such as header manipulation and packet integrity checks to be performed
at line-rates. These tasks reduce the workload on the CPU/NPU allowing it
to handle other compute intensive L3-L7 tasks. The new GOLDEN GATE Bridge
Processor CN2B100 provides SPI-3 to PCI/PCI-X connectivity, the CN2B200
part provides SPI-4 to PCI/PCI-X connectivity, CN2B300 part connects a SPI-3
interface to a SPI-4 interface, CN2B400 part connects a SPI-3 interface
to a SPI-4 interface and a PCI/PCI-X interface, and the CN2B500 connects
2 SPI-4 interfaces to a PCI/PCI-X interface. The PCI bus on the various
parts supports version 2.2 and the PCI-X bus supports version 1.0. The power
dissipation varies from 4 - 8 watts depending on the part. All parts come
in a 1096 HSBGA package.
"Cavium's successful Nitrox security processors also perform a useful bridging function between dissimilar interfaces in networking systems. Acknowledging the ubiquitous requirement for bridging, the company has chosen to separate the bridging function out as a standalone, new product family," said Sanjay Iyer, Senior Analyst at the Linley Group. "Based on their derivation from Cavium's proven technology, these lower-cost replacements for the FPGAs traditionally used for bridging can also perform transformations on streaming data, increasing their utility and adaptability for networking applications".
"Cavium's design team has developed industry-leading competence in high speed CPU and IO design. Our award-winning NITROX security product family was the first product family built on this competence. The GOLDEN GATE SPI Bridge Processor family provides us with another opportunity to leverage our developed intellectual property into another product area of the communication market segment", said Syed Ali, President and CEO of Cavium Networks. "With a wide range of interfaces and its unique intelligence features, GOLDEN GATE SPI Bridge Processor family dramatically reduces customer's time and cost of implementing bridging in the Enterprise and Service Provider equipment markets."
Complete Solution
Cavium's complete solution includes chips, evaluation boards (reference
hardware designs), and drivers. The GOLDEN GATE SPI Bridge Processor evaluation/development
kit is supported by drivers and chip configuration utilities. The intelligent
bridges include microcode as well. With this software and hardware reference,
customers can quickly integrate GOLDEN GATE SPI Bridge Processors with minimal
engineering effort.
analogZONE Says . . .
Leave it to Cavium to stake out another under-served market and deliver a first-class solution. While not as sexy as the security processors that they are famous for, I suspect that the demand for silicon that ties together SPI and PCI systems will be even larger than for their security chips. At first glance, this new product line would appear to be a radical departure from their original business plan, but in some ways it really isn't. Heck, I was as surprised as anybody about it, until they pointed out that these new devices reuse many of the technologies, design skills, and IP that allowed them to capture a significant chunk of the security market. And it didn't hurt that Cavium's customers are in good part the motivation behind the development of this new product line.
Cavium has spent a lot of time developing the SPI-3/4.2, and PCI/-X cores that tie their security processors to various systems, and now they've put them to good use in creating a set of highly-efficient "glue" elements to connect SPI-based classifiers, framers, NPs, and switch fabrics with x86 processors and other chips that use PCI/PCI-x as their main bus. They also say that there is a large demand for the devices to help bridge the proprietary SPI-based backplanes used in many networking products with systems. In both applications, these critters offer significant power savings over the FPGA-based solutions currently being used, and in most cases, some cost savings as well.
Depending on what you're doing with them, these bridge chips are microcode-programmable to support either transparent connections for simple line-rate bridging, and an intelligent option that will perform on-the-fly packet manipulation, or prepend/append operations. The on-chip processing capability also allows you to offload functions like CRC/TCP checksum and IP integrity checks from a host system.
These devices should find lots of applications in networking and communications, connecting MACs (such as the Intel IXF110x series, PMC's PM 3386, and TransSwitch parts), and the many NPUs and protocol processors that have a native SPI interface to PCI-based systems. Conversely, I expect there well be many x86-based systems needing connectivity to a SPI media / co-processor device. Surprisingly, SPI 3.0-4.2 bridging is also a big market because it allows lots of existing SPI 3 designs to run with state-of-the art parts and equipment, making for cost-effective modernization of legacy designs.
Samples of all five GOLDEN GATE SPI-bridge processors are available, with production next quarter, with pricing from $97 to $175 in10-k piece lots.
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