Altera expands OTN solution capabilities with acquisition of TPACK

USA: Altera Corp. announced it has agreed to acquire TPACK, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Applied Micro Circuits Corp.

TPACK delivers complete FPGA-based OTN (optical transport network) products targeting packet and optical networking equipment suppliers.  The acquisition enables Altera to accelerate and expand its OTN solutions roadmap to support the increasing pipeline of customer designs resulting from Altera's successful acquisition in 2010 of Avalon Microelectronics, a leading OTN IP provider.

Combining TPACK with Altera's current OTN development team positions Altera for continued growth in FPGA-based IP solutions for the OTN equipment market, which is forecast to reach $13B by 2017, according to research firm Infonetics.

TPACK develops OTN solutions in the form of SoftSilicon® technology to provide mapping, multiplexing and cross-connection of packets over an OTN network and pioneered standard chipset solutions similar to ASSPs, yet targeting FPGAs. SoftSilicon products are available today on Altera FPGAs and have been in production for years.

TPACK products have successfully displaced ASSPs at leading OEMs at 10-Gbps, 40-Gbps and 100-Gbps. The acquisition of TPACK bolsters Altera's portfolio of OTN solutions, including cost-optimized 20-Gbps OTN mappers for Metro applications and 10 x 10 Gbps OTN Cross-Connect using partial reconfiguration for Packet-Optical Transport Systems.