Using FPGAs to
Design Gigabit
Serial Backplanes
April 17, 2002
Outline
•System Design Trends
•Serial Backplanes Architectures
•Building Serial Backplanes with FPGAs
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Key System Design Trends
•Need for ….
–Easy Scalability of Performance
–Extremely High Availability
–Flexible Architecture
–Use of Standards
• Rapid Time to Market
• Reduces Costs
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Merging Communications & Computers
• Communications Systems have serial backplanes
• Computers moving to serial backplanes
Database servers
Application servers
1U Web servers
Ethernet Switches
“Bladed Server”, PICMG 2.16
Internet
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Serial Standards
• Serial Standards
– Fiber Channel 1 Gbps
– Ethernet 1 Gbps
– InfiniBand 2.5 Gbps
• Parallel Standards Going Serial
– PCI => 3GIO
– RapidIO => Serial RapidIO
– ATA => Serial ATA
• Channel Bonded Serial Standards
– XAUI 10 Gigabit Ethernet (4 x 3.125 Gbps)
3GIO
3GIO
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Serial Connectivity = Higher
Bandwidth & Fewer Pins
2
3
4
5
1
50
Example - PCI: 32-bit x 33MHz = 1 Gbps, Shared among 5 clients 250 total pins
1
2
3
4
5
4
Virtex-II Pro System: 2.5 Gbps x 4 x 5 = 50 Gbps 80 total pins
Each Client has 2.5 Gbps guaranteed to every other Client
50x higher bandwidth with less than 1/3 of the pins
RJG
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Serial Link Rates
•OC-768
•OC-192
•10GE
•FC-10x
•SxI-5
•3GIO
•Infiniband
•Rapid IO
•OC-48
•GigE
•FC-2x
•FC
•OC-12
2000
2002
2004
Mainstream Deployment
2006
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40G
10G
3.125G
1.25G
622M
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155M
•OC-3
1998
Serial Topologies
Switched
Full Mesh
PICMG 2.16
PICMG 2.2
PICMG 3.x
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