Advantech, NetLogic Microsystems announce 40Gbps AdvancedTCA platform

TAIPEI, TAIWAN & SANTA CLARA, USA: Advantech, a global manufacturer of telecom computing blades and multi-core network platforms, and NetLogic Microsystems Inc., a worldwide leader in high-performance intelligent semiconductor solutions for next-generation Internet networks, announced their collaboration to deliver the industry’s most advanced 40-Gbps AdvancedTCA (ATCA) platform using NetLogic Microsystems’ XLP multi-core, multi-threaded processors with 64 NXCPUs™, knowledge-based processors, and 10GE PHY solutions.

Advantech’s ATCA-7410 is designed to support the new 40-Gbps ATCA standards and is targeted at LTE enhanced packet core (EPC) gateways, service routers, metro ethernet, access aggregation, mobile backhaul systems and network security platforms.

Building on the success of its Packetarium portfolio that uses NetLogic Microsystems’ XLR multi-core processors, the ATCA-7410 extends Advantech’s packet processing offering to the ATCA form factor to enable greater scalability and higher availability for OEMs building state-of-the-art networking equipment.

Each ATCA-7410 blade incorporates an impressive 64 NXCPUs from the XLP processor family, 128 knowledge-based processing engines from the NL11k processor family and multiple NLP1342 10GE PHYs to deliver significant advantages in performance, functionality, power and cost.

This advanced ATCA system is targeted to meet the needs for Tier One original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to support systems with up to fourteen blades in a chassis to enable scalability to over 500Gbps throughput per chassis.

“The ATCA-7410 design leverages NetLogic Microsystems’ best-in-class technologies across the board,” said Eddie Lai, director of business development at Advantech. “It represents the breakthrough ATCA product which Tier-1 OEMs are waiting for to perform uncompromised processing on every packet of traffic with minimal latency to ensure predictable network behavior and eliminate bottlenecks.”

“We’re pleased to see Advantech utilizing the performance advantages brought by combining our market-leading products its new ATCA-7410 platform offering,” said Chris O’Reilly, vice president of marketing at NetLogic Microsystems. “We congratulate Advantech on the introduction of its flagship ATCA-7410 platform that offers compelling benefits to network equipment providers.”

Central to the ATCA-7410 solution are best-in-class XLP processors combining the power of 64 NXCPUs that each operate at up to 2.0 GHz and are based on an innovative superscalar engine with out-of-order execution capabilities to deliver unparalleled data and control plane performance, as well as the ability to support billions of in-flight messages and packet descriptors.

The XLP cores are quad-threaded to effectively minimize bottlenecks and memory latencies that are inherent in data-plane processing applications. The 40nm XLP processors also include complete offload of network functions, including IPSec/SSL security functions, packet parsing, ordering, queuing, management, TCP segmentation, storage, compression/decompression and IEEE1588 hardware time stamping.

To complement the 64 NXCPUs, the XLP832 multi-core, multi-threaded processors interface directly over a 50Gb/s high-speed, low-latency serial bus to the NL11k knowledge-based processor, giving the CPUs high-speed access to 128 of NetLogic Microsystems’ market-leading knowledge-based processing engines to deliver up to 1.2 billion decisions per second of advanced Layers 2 - 4 flow classification, IPv4/IPv6 forwarding, ACL security and quality-of-service (QoS) policing. The NL11k is also produced in TSMC’s 40nm high performance process, again delivering optimum die size, performance and power.

To complete the ATCA-7410 solution, the blade includes multiple NLP1342 quad-port 10 GbE PHY devices from NetLogic Microsystems with best-in-class receive equalization and transmit pre-emphasis technologies for lower latency and jitter, and extended cablings distances for 10/40/100 GbE applications.

The device, which is also manufactured in the advanced 40nm node, supports both direct-attach twin-ax copper and SR/LR optical cabling and offers the industry’s lowest power consumption of 0.5 Watt/channel to enable energy-efficient networking equipment.

Advantech’s ATCA-7410 platforms will be sampling in the fourth quarter of 2010.