The 21Z01 OctalPHY fits into a package that's only 1.5 cm on a side. It's manufactured using a standard CMOS process, and consumes just 1.25 W with a 2.5-V supply.
Though that low power dissipation is important now, it becomes even more so in the future. The company is using a macrocell version of its serial technology to design custom chips, such as systems-on-a-chip. "We are currently engaged with customers on projects that will put large numbers of these channels on a single chip. If each one of them consumes a watt, you don't get very many before that chip melts," states Dedrick. "It's terribly important for us to drive the power per channel down to the lowest possible value, so that when we get to the system-on-a-chip integrations we can have a manageable thermal dissipation in the chip. And we've achieved that. We've hit a level of about 100 mW for each gigabit channel."
The company sees applications for the chip in a few main categories. It can target Internet routers and network switches, servers and workstations, and inter-campus networks.
A 32-Gbit/s switch is a typical example of how the 21Z01 can be used (Fig. 2). In this example, every piece of data that enters the switch eventually goes through the switch card and is then directed to its final destination. A number of line cards (four are shown here) are the interfaces to the outside world. The application is simply to move data over the backplane (shown on the left hand side of the diagram) between the line cards and the switch card. The serial backplane not only reduces pin count, but power consumption, too. A parallel backplane might contain 640 pins and use 12 W of driver power, while the serial backplane—consisting of four 21Z01s—would contain 128 pins and consume only 2 W of power.
If you take a look at the line cards themselves, you'll see that these also represent an application for the 21Z01. Suppose you wanted to build a line card that produced eight gigabit Ethernet channels. The conventional way to do this is to use a MAC (media access controller) and some number of discretely implemented functions, which result in the external interfaces. AANetcom can replace all that logic with a single 21Z01. AANetcom says the device provides a uniquely dense and low-power solution on the front side—on the customer-visible side of the box—where he sees these gigabit Ethernet ports and he hooks them up to his network.
Overall, the concept of the OctalPHy device is to put more bandwidth through fewer pins, which AANetcom regards as a huge benefit to customers. One 21Z01 replaces up to 80 bits of a bus. Each one of the device's channels takes 10 bits in and produces a single bit stream out. The net result is that 80 parallel bits are reduced to eight serial outputs.
This is a scalable technique. The company asserts that there's no inherent limit to how many lines can be used in one serial link and how fast that serial link can go. It plans a rapid advance of the bit rate. Subsequent products are going to start at 2.5 Gbits/s and go up from there. Says Dedrick, "That indicates to our customers that we are going to stay with their needs for a few generations, rather than run into a wall."
Price & Availability
The 21Z01 is sampling now with full production scheduled for March. In quantities of 1000, the device is priced at $48 in a 208-pin, 15- by 15-mm BGA package.
AANetcom Inc., 6868 Santa Teresa Blvd., San Jose, CA 95119; (408) 360-8800; fax (408) 360-8801; e-mail: info@aanetcom. com; www.aanetcom.com.
The 21Z01 OctalPHY fits into a package that's only 1.5 cm on a side. It's manufactured using a standard CMOS process, and consumes just 1.25 W with a 2.5-V supply.
Though that low power dissipation is important now, it becomes even more so in the future. The company is using a macrocell version of its serial technology to design custom chips, such as systems-on-a-chip. "We are currently engaged with customers on projects that will put large numbers of these channels on a single chip. If each one of them consumes a watt, you don't get very many before that chip melts," states Dedrick. "It's terribly important for us to drive the power per channel down to the lowest possible value, so that when we get to the system-on-a-chip integrations we can have a manageable thermal dissipation in the chip. And we've achieved that. We've hit a level of about 100 mW for each gigabit channel."
The company sees applications for the chip in a few main categories. It can target Internet routers and network switches, servers and workstations, and inter-campus networks.
A 32-Gbit/s switch is a typical example of how the 21Z01 can be used (Fig. 2). In this example, every piece of data that enters the switch eventually goes through the switch card and is then directed to its final destination. A number of line cards (four are shown here) are the interfaces to the outside world. The application is simply to move data over the backplane (shown on the left hand side of the diagram) between the line cards and the switch card. The serial backplane not only reduces pin count, but power consumption, too. A parallel backplane might contain 640 pins and use 12 W of driver power, while the serial backplane—consisting of four 21Z01s—would contain 128 pins and consume only 2 W of power.
If you take a look at the line cards themselves, you'll see that these also represent an application for the 21Z01. Suppose you wanted to build a line card that produced eight gigabit Ethernet channels. The conventional way to do this is to use a MAC (media access controller) and some number of discretely implemented functions, which result in the external interfaces. AANetcom can replace all that logic with a single 21Z01. AANetcom says the device provides a uniquely dense and low-power solution on the front side—on the customer-visible side of the box—where he sees these gigabit Ethernet ports and he hooks them up to his network.
Overall, the concept of the OctalPHy device is to put more bandwidth through fewer pins, which AANetcom regards as a huge benefit to customers. One 21Z01 replaces up to 80 bits of a bus. Each one of the device's channels takes 10 bits in and produces a single bit stream out. The net result is that 80 parallel bits are reduced to eight serial outputs.
This is a scalable technique. The company asserts that there's no inherent limit to how many lines can be used in one serial link and how fast that serial link can go. It plans a rapid advance of the bit rate. Subsequent products are going to start at 2.5 Gbits/s and go up from there. Says Dedrick, "That indicates to our customers that we are going to stay with their needs for a few generations, rather than run into a wall."
Price & Availability
The 21Z01 is sampling now with full production scheduled for March. In quantities of 1000, the device is priced at $48 in a 208-pin, 15- by 15-mm BGA package.
AANetcom Inc., 6868 Santa Teresa Blvd., San Jose, CA 95119; (408) 360-8800; fax (408) 360-8801; e-mail: info@aanetcom. com; www.aanetcom.com.