June 6, 2005 -- Xilinx, Inc. today announced the immediate availability of a 4 Gbps programmable Fibre Channel solution. Designed specifically for the Virtex-4 FPGA family, the new 4G Fibre Channel core provides system architects with the ability to scale storage area network designs to higher fibre channel rates, addressing the industry's increasing demand for high performance enterprise storage systems.

Xilinx also revealed its plans to develop future 8G and higher speed Fibre Channel solutions by leveraging the capabilities of the Virtex-4 FPGA's RocketIO MGTs with the industry's broadest 622Mbps - 10.3125 Gbps range and high-performance signal integrity features. Similar to its 1G and 2G fibre channel solutions, Xilinx plans to test the latest solution for fibre channel conformance and interoperability at the University of New Hampshire's interoperability lab ensuring first time design success.

The Xilinx Fibre Channel (FC) IP core has been designed to ANSI INCITS X3-230-1994 (R1999), X3-297-1997 (R2002), X3-303-1998 FC-PH, T11-FC-FS, and T11-FC-SW-3 specifications and can run at 1G (1062.5 Mb), 2G (2125 Mb), 4G (4250 Mb). 1G / 2G (negotiable) or 2G / 4G (negotiable) per second implementations are also available using optional hardware-based speed negotiation feature. The core supports class 1, 2, 3, 4 and F frames and the port-independent implementation supports underlying functionality for all non-arbitrated loop port types: N, F, E, and B.

"The 4GFC standard is becoming more and more ubiquitous in new designs. Future 4GFC designs must be fully interoperable with hardware in the field and compatible with the latest drive and server interconnects. We expect 4GFC adoption to continue its aggressive ramp throughout the coming year," said Anil Vasudeva, Principal Analyst at IMEX Research. "4G Fibre Channel capability in an FPGA provides designers with the ability to get to market more quickly while leveraging additional resources in the FPGA to capitalize on market requirements such as port consolidation, virtualization and distributed storage for servers and storage appliances."

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