High performance for comms systems designers

The reprogrammable Bridge100 has been designed to provide an array of 1.5GHz Achronix SPD60 fpgas, 8GB of additional on board memory and two 120Gbps communication ports. The platform offers two 120Gbps bidirectional interfaces; three QSFP connectors on one side and 12 XFP connectors on the other. Speedster high performance fpga features are available, including logic, RAMs, multipliers, SerDes, programmable I/Os and Achronix picoPIPE acceleration technology. The programmable logic takes the form of an array of SPD60s from the company's Speedster family of fpgas – which it claims are the world's fastest reprogrammable logic devices - with up to 1.5 GHz in fabric performance. Achromix says that the high datapath bandwidth of each SPD60 (10.3Gbps SerDes) provides enough bandwidth to support two 100Gbps interfaces (Ethernet, Infiniband). Additional SerDes lanes are used in 60Gbps chip-to-chip links, effectively fusing the SPD60s into one 'megachip.' Each SPD60 provides up to 273Gbps of raw DDR3 memory bandwidth. Yousef Khalilollahi, Achronix' worldwide vice president of sales and marketing, said: "Instead of merely claiming to support 100G applications, we have built a system enabling 100G interface between networks of different protocol. Our Bridge100 Platform serves as a connection between different protocols, including Infiniband and Ethernet, to maximise total system performance."