Altera demos 25-Gbps transceivers in programmable logic

SAN JOSE, USA: Altera Corp. announced that it has achieved a significant milestone in transceiver technology by becoming the first company to successfully demonstrate 25-Gbps transceiver performance in programmable logic.

Altera achieved this milestone in its 28-nm transceiver test chip, a prototyping platform that Altera is using to successfully deploy 28-Gbps transceivers on 28-nm FPGAs.

Reaching the 25-Gbps milestone more than doubles the transceiver performance in currently available FPGA solutions, and rivals or exceeds the abilities of competitive ASSP offerings. A demonstration video of the 28-nm transceiver test chip is available for viewing on Altera's website.

Altera's 28-nm transceiver test chip provides insight into how high-performance transceiver designs behave on TSMC's leading-edge 28-nm high-performance (HP) process. Results of the test chip enable Altera to develop and apply optimization techniques for power, jitter and link performance in the production tape-out of Stratix V FPGAs featuring 28-Gbps transceivers.

Altera's Stratix V FPGAs are architected to serve markets that require very high performance at fixed cost and power budgets, such as military communications, optical transmission networks and emerging test equipment systems.

Today, Altera is the only company shipping production FPGAs with transceivers operating at 11.3 Gbps, and being the first FPGA vendor to reach the 25-Gbps milestone further extends Altera's leadership in transceiver technology.

“Altera's achievements with transceiver technology at 28-nm sets the bar high for the rest of the chip industry who are rapidly trying to support the next-generation of 4x25-Gbps high-density, low-power optical modules,” said Christian Urricariet, director of marketing for high-speed optics at Finisar.

“Together, Altera and Finisar are leading the way to bringing high-bandwidth, low-cost optical communications to the market which will inevitably change the way datacenters are designed and architected.”

“The industry's move to 28-Gbps transceivers enables next-generation broadband networks to address the demand for increasing bandwidth while maintaining form factor, cost and power constraints,” said Luanne Schirrmeister, senior director of product marketing at Altera.

“The results we demonstrated on our 28-nm transceiver test chip clearly show Altera is on the forefront of this evolution and we are on target to achieve 28-Gbps on our 28-nm FPGAs. Our ability to provide these high-performance, low-power transceivers is a direct result of the close collaboration between Altera and TSMC and the use of TSMC's 28-nm HP process, which offers an ideal choice for devices used in next-generation, high-bandwidth systems.”