Fibre-to-the-FPGA

Briefing: Optical Interconnect

Part 1: FPGAs

Programmable logic chip vendor Altera is developing FPGAs with optical interfaces. But is there a need for such technology and how difficult will it be to develop? 

FPGAs with optical interfaces promise to simplify high-speed interfacing between and within telecom and datacom systems. Such fibre-based FPGAs, once available, could also trigger novel system architectures. But not all FPGA vendors believe optical-enabled FPGAs’ time has come, arguing that cost and reliability hurdles must be overcome for system vendors to embrace the technology 

“One of the advantages of using optics is that you haven’t got to throw your backplanes away as [interface] speeds increase.”

Craig Davis, Altera

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Operators want to cut power by a fifth by 2020

Briefing: Green ICT

Part 2: Operators’ power efficiency strategies

Service providers have set themselves ambitious targets to reduce their energy consumption by a fifth by 2020. This despite the expected traffic they will carry being thirty times today’s volumes. Given the cost of electricity and operators’ requirements, such targets are not surprising: KPN, with its 12,000 sites in The Netherlands, consumes 1% of the country’s electricity.

 

“We also have to invest in capital expenditure for a big swap of equipment – in mobile and DSLAMs"

Philippe Tuzzolino, France Telecom-Orange

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ICT could reduce global carbon emissions by 15%

Briefing: Green ICT

Part 1: Standards and best practices

Keith Dickerson is chair of the International Telecommunication Union's (ITU) working party on information and communications technology (ICT) and climate change.

In a Q&A with Gazettabyte, he discusses how ICT can help reduce emissions in other industries, where the power hot spots are in the network and what the ITU is doing.

"If you benchmark base stations across different countries and different operators, there is a 5:1 difference in their energy consumption"

Keith Dickerson

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Virtualisation set to transform data centre networking

Briefing:  Data centre switching

Part 3: Networking developments

The adoption of virtualisation techniques is causing an upheaval in the data centre. Virtualisation is being used to boost server performance, but its introduction is changing how switching equipment is networked.

“This is the most critical period of data centre transformation seen in decades,” says Raju Rajan, global system networking evangelist at IBM.

“We are on a long hard path – it is going to be a really challenging transition”

Stephen Garrison, Force10 Networks

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Fulcrum's Alta switch chips add programmable pipeline to keep pace with standards

Briefing:  Data centre switching 

Part 2: Ethernet switch chips

Fulcrum Microsystems has announced its latest FocalPoint chip family of Ethernet switches. The Alta FM6000 series family supports up to 72 10-Gigabit ports and can process over one billion packets a second.

“Instead of every top-of-rack switch having a CPU subsystem, you could put all the horsepower into a set of server blades”

Gary Lee, Fulcrum Microsystems

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Is Broadcom’s chip powering Juniper’s Stratus?

Briefing:  Data centre switching

Part 1: Single-layer switch architectures

Juniper Networks’ Stratus switch architecture, designed for next-generation data centres, is several months away from trials. First detailed in 2009, Stratus is being engineered as a single-layer switch with an architecture that will scale to support tens of thousands of 10 Gigabit-per-second (Gbps) ports.

Stratus will be in customer trials in early 2011.

Andy Ingram, Juniper Networks

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To efficiency and beyond

Briefing:  Dynamic optical networks

Part 3: ROADM and control plane developments

ROADMs and control plane technology look set to finally deliver reconfigurable optical networks but challenges remain.

Operators are assessing how best to architect their networks - from the router to the optical layer - to boost efficiencies and reduce costs.  It is developments at the photonic layer that promise to make the most telling contribution to lowering the cost of transport, a necessity given how the revenue-per-bit that carriers receive continues to dwindle.

Global ROADM forecast 2009 -14 in US $ miliions Source: Ovum

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