Achronix Semiconductor and Opticomp recently announced a platform for developing, characterising, and demonstrating high-speed optical data communication. The joint effort produced a fully programmable, 120Gb/s multiport system (expandable to 160Gb/s) that can be used with individual optical modules or with multiple 40Gb/s optical paths connected together into a network.
Among the system-level products offered by Achronix is the Bridge100 System—the basis of the collaboration with Opticomp. The Bridge100 system features:
• 120Gb/s bidirectional throughput (three 40 Gb/s ports and twelve 10 Gb/s ports)
• Additional expansion ports (80Gb/s)
• Additional video ports (four HDMI Tx, four HDMI Rx)
• Up to 32GB of traffic buffering (DDR3 SDRAM at 1066Mb/s per lane)
• Nine SPD60 FPGAs (fully reprogrammable)
The combination of data bandwidth, memory bandwidth, logic capacity, and full reprogrammability results in a powerful platform for ultra-high-speed data transmission, claim the companies. When used as a standalone test system, the primary roles of the Bridge100 are data generation, formatting, and checking. When used with external traffic sources and destinations (as in an operational data network), its primary roles are classification, storage, retrieval, and transmission.