Xilinx accelerates development of SFI-5 applications with hardware-verified solutions
( 01 Jul 2008 )
Xilinx, Inc. has announced availability of a free hardware-verified reference design and 3rd party IP for the optical internetworking forum (OIF) SERDES framer interface level 5 (SFI-5) standard. The SFI-5 interface enables communication between the optical transmission devices and the network processing system. Based on its 65nm Xilinx Virtex-5 LX330T FPGAs, the reference design accelerates the development of wired networking systems requiring 40Gbps payload rates, enabling applications using transport interfaces like OC768/STM256 and OTN OTU-3 in systems such as optical cross connects, fiber optics terminators and repeaters, 40G multiplexers, and test equipment. The reference design has been hardware verified on the Xilinx ML525 evaluation platform and characterized for skew, temperature, process, and voltage variations to ensure reliable interface, compatible with the OIF SFI-5 standard. Leveraging the low power transceivers -- typically consuming less than 100mW per transmitter/receiver pair -- this Virtex-5 LXT FPGA-based reference design uses 17 transceivers (16 for data and one for calibration).
