Advantech 40 Gbps ATCA-7410

Advantech, a global manufacturer of telecom computing blades and multicore network platforms, is collaborating with NetLogic Microsystems to deliver a 40 Gbps AdvancedTCA platform using NetLogic’s XLP multicore, multithreaded processors with 64 NXCPUs, knowledge-based processors and 10GE PHY solutions.

Advantech’s ATCA-7410 is designed to support the new 40 Gbps ATCA standards and is targeted at LTE enhanced packet core gateways, service routers, metro ethernet, access aggregation, mobile backhaul systems and network security platforms.

The 7410 extends the company’s packet processing offering to the ATCA form factor to enable greater scalability and higher availability for OEMs building networking equipment.

Each ATCA-7410 blade incorporates 64 NXCPUs from the XLP processor family, 128 knowledge-based processing engines from the NL11k processor family and multiple NLP1342 10GE PHYs to deliver significant advantages in performance, functionality, power and cost.

This system is targeted to meet the needs for tier one original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to support systems with up to 14 blades in a chassis to enable scalability to over 500 Gbps throughput per chassis.

Central to the ATCA-7410 are XLP processors combining the power of 64 NXCPUs that each operate at up to 2.0 GHz and are based on a superscalar engine with out-of-order execution capabilities to deliver data and control plane performance, as well as support billions of in-flight messages and packet descriptors.

The XLP cores are quad-threaded to effectively minimise bottlenecks and memory latencies. The 40 nm XLP processors also include complete offload of network functions, including IPSec/SSL security functions, packet parsing, ordering, queuing, management, compression/decompression, storage, TCP segmentation and IEEE1588 hardware time stamping.

To complement the 64 NXCPUs, the XLP832 multicore, multithreaded processors interface directly over a 50 Gbps high-speed, low-latency serial bus to the NL11k knowledge-based processor, giving the CPUs high-speed access to 128 of NetLogic’s knowledge-based processing engines to deliver up to 1.2 billion decisions per second of advanced Layers 2-4 flow classification, IPv4/IPv6 forwarding, ACL security and quality-of-service (QoS) policing.

To complete the ATCA-7410 solution, the blade includes multiple NLP1342 quad-port 10 GbE PHY devices from NetLogic with receive equalisation and transmit pre-emphasis technologies for lower latency and jitter and extended cablings distances for 10/40/100 GbE applications.

The device, which is also manufactured in the 40 nm node, supports both direct-attach twin-ax copper and SR/LR optical cabling and offers low power consumption of 0.5 W/channel.