16 September 2003 Boston Lightwave--At the Embedded Systems Conference, Xilinx announced the immediate availability of its RocketPHY XFP design kit featuring the company's RocketPHY 10-Gbit/sec physical layer transceivers. The kit includes a host board designed to accommodate a 10 Gigabit small form-factor pluggable (XFP) optical transceiver, and enables an easy migration path from the 300-pin multisource agreement (MSA) compliant optical transponder modules to the emerging XFP optical transceiver module specification. The XFP board is designed for applications requiring high-speed serial interfaces in the MAN, WAN, LAN and SAN.
The RocketPHY XFP design kit allows telecommunications, data communications, and storage system OEMs to easily deploy low cost XFP modules into their existing systems without consuming internal design resources. The RocketPHY XFP design kit can also be used to evaluate third party XFP module vendors, or for interoperability testing between different XFP modules and the RocketPHY 10-Gbit/sec physical layer transceiver. Xilinx has validated interoperability with the leading XFP modules currently available.
The RocketPHY XFP board may be operated in a standalone configuration for demonstration and evaluation purposes, or connected via the industry standard 300-pin MSA connector to a user's system (line card) in place of a traditional 300-pin MSA optical module for in-system evaluation. The board will fit into most MSA footprints, including the small-form-factor (SFF) 300-pin MSAs. A Xilinx CoolRunner-II CPLD is also on board to allow reconfiguration of all control pins routed to and from the 300-pin MSA connector. In addition to the RocketPHY on-chip loopback mode, a separate loopback board is provided with the kit to enable external parallel side RX to TX loopback. The loop backboard can also be used to set fixed 16-bit words on the parallel TX input to enable fixed pattern testing and system debug.
Price and availability
The RocketPHY XFP kits are currently available with or without an XFP module. Each kit includes the RocketPHY XFP board with the XFP 30-pin connector, cage, heat sink, external loopback board, and CD-ROM with all applicable documentation, including data sheets, user guides, BOMs, schematics, and Gerber files of the board design. Option one of the XFP kit (PN#: HWK-RPHY2XFP), without the XFP module, is priced at $1,995 in small quantities. Option two of the XFP kit (PN#: HWKDO-RPHY2XFP-M) includes a third-party XFP optical transceiver module and is priced at $3,495. Xilinx also offers an available RocketPHY Evaluation kit. This kit includes an Eval board with SMA connectors for detailed device performance evaluation. Qualified customers can order these and other kits by contacting a Xilinx sales office.