Altera Demos 25Gbps Transceivers in 28nm FPGAs

Altera Corp. has achieved a significant milestone in transceiver technology by becoming the first company to successfully demonstrate 25Gbps transceiver performance in programmable logic. Altera achieved this milestone in its 28nm transceiver test chip, a prototyping platform that Altera is using to successfully deploy 28Gbps transceivers on 28nm FPGAs. Reaching the 25Gbps milestone more than doubles the transceiver performance in currently available FPGA solutions, and rivals or exceeds the abilities of competitive ASSP offerings.

Altera's 28nm transceiver test chip provides insight into how high-performance transceiver designs behave on TSMC's leading-edge 28nm 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 28Gbps 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 11.3Gbps, and being the first FPGA vendor to reach the 25Gbps milestone further extends Altera's leadership in transceiver technology.

"The industry's move to 28Gbps 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 28nm transceiver test chip clearly show Altera is on the forefront of this evolution and we are on target to achieve 28Gbps on our 28nm 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 28nm HP process, which offers an ideal choice for devices used in next-generation, high-bandwidth systems."

Altera

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