Lucent chooses Xilinx FPGAs for tunable optical translator unit

April 27, 2004 San Jose, CA--Lucent Technologies has selected Xilinx field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) for its new 10-Gbit/sec tunable optical translator unit, a key component in one of its DWDM-based metro optical platforms. At the core of this advanced design is a Xilinx Virtex-II Pro FPGA, with the embedded IBM PowerPC running Linux.

The Virtex-II Pro FPGA helped meet Lucent's design needs of reducing the footprint of the control and communication logic, providing backward compatibility to existing deployed equipment, along with incorporating a high performance processor architecture and providing improved in-circuit programming and debugging capabilities. Optical equipment customers are continually asking for lower cost and smaller footprint solutions that can be scaled to greater capabilities. Prior designs of this complexity had required a parent-daughter PCB configuration, which had size limitations, manufacturing drawbacks and cost implications, but the Virtex-II Pro FPGA addresses that problem, helping to dramatically reduce the footprint and cost of the overall design.

"Our decision to use the Xilinx Virtex-III Pro with embedded PowerPC processor for the control and communications functions in our 10-Gbit/sec tunable optical translator unit enabled us to meet demanding customer requirements," said Mike Libeskind, a member of the technical staff at Lucent. "Moreover, the Xilinx applications engineering assistance and on-site design support we received were critical in helping us meet our product specifications and schedules. The use of the Xilinx FPGA-based solution enabled us to go to a single board, saving substantial development, manufacturing and test costs."

The Virtex-II Pro is the first FPGA to offer integrated PowerPC embedded technology, according to Xilinx. The company has shipped over 100,000 PowerPC cores to its customer base and enabled over 1,400 CoreConnect licenses.

Xilinx offers a fully integrated hardware/software development environment called Platform Studio as part of its Embedded Development Kit. The kit is comprised of an extensive library of IP (over two hundred cores), application/reference designs, internal and third party provided tools.Xilinx Design Services augments customer design teams with industry experts in FPGA design techniques and programmable logic solutions such as systems architecture consulting, hardware engineering, and embedded software design.