Customer
A Tier 1 Network Equipment Maker (NEM) engaged AimValley for Design Services in FPGA and software to support capabilities on their Packet Optical switch.
Customer Objectives
In this case the customer came to AimValley due to leverage our expertise in TDM and SONET/SDH to replace their previous solution. The expectation was to provide a design that at a minimum would deliver feature parity while at the same time lower the cost of the solution.
AimValley Solution
As a result of this design services contract, AimValley delivered an FPGA design that included: a TDM matrix, a complete series of TDM over packet SONET/SDH line interfaces, all of which were converted to packet streams into/from a 10GE packet backplane.
Also included in the development work was Software development to create the associated PCIe driver complete with the API.
Over and above the interfaces and packet handling, AimValley provided Line and path protection, VT-1.5 UPSR, and Sync reference.
Key Technologies
This design services contract involved both a SONET and SDH framer application along with STS-1 / VT-1.5, VC-4/3/12 cross-connect and TDM over packet (TDMoP) conversions.
Design Briefs
Results and Added Value
Efficient
Leveraged AimValley’s previous experience and intellectual property in TDM circuit emulation and SONET/SDH. This reduced the time to develop the solution, lowered costs, with confidence that this solution would perform well.
Successful
This program delivered a solution rapidly with multiple releases to add additional features.
Partnership
AimValley engineers worked with customer’s R&D team to define and deliver API integrations in customer host software and to create and deliver an FPGA design in close co-operation with the overall product/backplane design.
Innovation
This FPGA solution replaced 3 x ASICs with a single AMD KU15P which reduced cost, size and power requirements. This also eliminated the hard-coded nature of ASICs with the flexibility of FPGAs allowing product enhancement software releases.
