Product category:
Intellectual Property Cores
News Release from: Actel Europe | Subject: Fibre Channel cores
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 31 October 2003
Fibre Channel cores run on military
FPGAs
Actel and MorethanIP have launched the industry's first Gigabit Fibre Channel IP cores designed for FPGA devices operating to military temperature specifications.
Actel and MorethanIP have launched the industry's first Gigabit Fibre Channel IP cores designed for FPGA devices operating to military temperature specifications The new Gigabit Fibre Channel cores, available from MorethanIP as part of Actel's CompanionCore Alliance Programme, support Actel's new military Axcelerator devices, as well as industrial and commercial temperature solutions in the Axcelerator family
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 5 Aug 2008 at 8.00am (UK)
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When implemented in Actel's Axcelerator FPGAs, the cores offer the most secure, cost-effective solution for Fibre Channel applications across the full spectrum of operating temperature conditions.
"The Fibre Channel protocol is rapidly gaining acceptance in the military avionics market", said Yankin Tanurhan, Senior Director, Applications and IP Solutions Group at Actel.
"The high data bandwidth capabilities of Fibre Channel make it an excellent protocol for connecting onboard aircraft computers with each other or other subsystems, enabling the protocol to become the network interconnection technology of choice for applications such as aircraft storage area networks, aircraft displays and integrated weapons and navigation systems".
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Francois Balay, CEO at MorethanIP, said: "The security benefits and firm error immunity of Actel's Axcelerator devices, combined with the MorethanIP low-cost, high-performance Fibre Channel IP cores provide designers with an attractive solution that meets the stringent requirements of the military and aviation markets".
Fibre Channel is an industry standard protocol for a high-bandwidth data bus over copper or fibre-optic interconnects for use in ground-based, aircraft and terrestrial networks such as local area networks (LANs), wireless area networks (WANs), storage area networks (SANs) and digital audio/video networks.
Fibre Channel supports point-to-point, switch fabric and arbitrated loop link connections.
Its data throughput is scalable from 100Mbit/s to over 1Gbit/s.
The two new Fibre Channel CompanionCores, a Gigabit Fibre Channel Transport core and a Gigabit Fibre Channel B Port controller core, both easily meet the Gigibit Fibre Channel operation requirement of 1.06Gbit/s in Actel's Axcelerator devices under military (-55 to +125C), industrial (-40 to +85C) and commercial (0 to +70C) temperature grades.
The Gigabit Fibre Channel Transport Core supports standard Fibre Channel applications and implements Fibre Channel higher PHY (Fibre Channel FC-1) layer and MAC (Lower FC-2) layer functions such as line coding (8B/10B), DC balancing, CRC check and calculation, frame encapsulation, primitive generation and decoding, and credit based flow control.
Through Actel's Axcelerator device I/Os, the Fibre Channel transport core can also interface to industry standard serdes devices via a built-in 10bit interface.
The B Port controller core enables designers to implement Fibre Channel bridging applications, such as Fibre Channel over Sonet or Fibre Channel over Ethernet.
As an Actel CompanionCore Alliance Programme member, MorethanIP has optimised its Fibre Channel IP cores for Actel's entire family of Axcelerator devices.
The cores, which run seamlessly with Actel's Libero integrated development environment (IDE) and Designer tool suites, are available immediately from MorethanIP as synthesisable VHDL or Verilog source code or as an Actel-optimised netlist.
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