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connectivityZONE Products for the week of May 22, 2006
Altera Corporation Says…
Altera and Genesys Logic Deliver
Altera Corporation and Genesys Logic announced the availability
of their x4 PCI-SIG-compliant solution using Altera's Stratix II FPGAs and
PCI Express x4 MegaCore intellectual property (IP) core and Genesys Logic's
GL9714 PCI Express x4 physical layer (PHY) chip. The solution helps designers
accelerate their development of PCI Express-based systems and provides them
with the industry's only PCI-SIG-compliant solution with a seamless migration
path from FPGAs to structured ASIC devices.
"Customers can take advantage of Altera's programmable solutions when designing next-generation PCI Express products and bypass the effort and investment of traditional ASIC development," said Steve Mensor, senior director of IP marketing at Altera. "Prototyping with a Stratix II FPGA, testing and debugging the FPGA prototype in-system and migrating to a HardCopy II structured ASIC is a guaranteed low-risk solution that allows customers to quickly move to high-volume production."
Advantages of PCI Express
As the successor to PCI, the PCI Express bus standard provides higher performance,
increased flexibility and scalability for next-generation systems, while
maintaining the software compatibility with existing PCI applications. The
complete x4 PCI Express solution from Altera and Genesys Logic provides
the bandwidth required for various test and medical, networking, storage,
imaging, office automation and other embedded applications.
Altera's portfolio of proven PCI-SIG-compliant FPGA solutions for x1, x4 and x8 PCI Express applications, using both external PHYs and embedded transceivers, is further extended with this x4 offering. The tools customers need to easily implement PCI Express in their applications include configurable PCI Express IP cores and development boards for endpoint, bridge, switch and root complex functionality. Genesys Logic offers the GL9714 along with a complete line of PCI Express compliant products targeted for a variety of applications. The GL9714 is an ideal solution for FPGA applications and has been successfully deployed in numerous customer designs.
"The combination of Altera's PCI Express IP and Stratix II FPGAs plus Genesys Logic's PHY chip delivers a fully operational PCI Express x4 solution as promised," said Scott Rust, director of research and development at National Instruments. "Leveraging this solution will help us expand the benefits of PCI Express as a comprehensive solution for the test instrumentation community by driving products compliant with the next generation of the PCI eXtensions for Instrumentation (PXI) standard, PXI Express."
analogZONE Says . . .
In the interest of fairness, I usually avoid reviewing the same company's products twice in any given section within the same month, but between the lull in product announcements I see every year before Globalcomm/Supercomm and the fact that Altera's jointly-developed PCIe solution is going to come in very handy for many FPGA-based designs, I thought it would be OK this time. While Altera's Higher-priced Stratix II GX products have SerDes cores that can be configured to directly support PCIe interfaces, their regular Stratix II (non-GX) family and their lower-priced Cyclone series require an external PHY. TI, Philips (reviewed here) and a couple of other vendors have single-lane PHY chips, but this is one of the few multi-lane solutions I've seen on the market. So while this two-chip solution may be a bit high-priced for production volumes (especially in consumer applications), it's significantly less than the previous solutions which required using four single-lane PHYs for a 10G PCIe connection. And, as the press release above says, using either the Stratix II or Cyclone family gives you the option to migrate your design to Altera's quick-turn FPGA-to- structured ASIC program. Dubbed HardCopy II, the program turns your FPGA code into a metal mask that's used to program a pre-fabbed logic array. This can provide significant cost savings after a product's design matures and sales volumes can justify the relatively reasonable tooling charges.
I'd normally fill another paragraph or two with snappy, insightful commentary but the press release above pretty much says it all about how quick and easy Altera has made it to incorporate PCI Express into your next design.
Altera Stratix II FPGAs are in production with the EP2S15 priced at $25 in 25-k piece lots. The Genesys Logic GL9714 PCI Express PHY is currently sampling with full production in Q3 2006 priced at $20 in 25-k piece lots.
Data Sheet
Altera PCIe Megacore
Data Sheet Genesys GL9714 PCIe PHY
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