Fibre Channel
Fibre Channel is a high-speed robust protocol for managing the transfer of information in storage area networks (SANs). It supports data rates from 1 through 10 Gbps. At 10 Gbps, it leverages much of the technology used by Ethernet, making use of XGMII and XAUI interfaces, for example. Fibre Channel can help designers of large-scale storage-intensive systems provide a solution that allows rapid storage and retrieval of information, while simplifying the interconnection of different components in the system.
Figure 1. Fibre Channel Topology
Altera® devices can implement 1-, 2-, 4-, 8-, and 10-Gbps versions of Fibre Channel. The cores are highly configurable, allowing you to customize the operation of the core without engaging in a separate engineering customization project. The Altera solutions cover the FC-1 and FC-2 layers of the Fibre Channel stack.
The high-speed Stratix® IV GX, HardCopy® IV GX, Stratix II GX, and Stratix GX devices provide the kind of performance that allows implementation of 1- and 2-Gbps Fibre Channel in lower-speed-grade devices, while still supporting leading-edge development of 4-Gbps, 8-Gbps, and 10-Gigabit implementations. Altera’s Stratix IV GX, HardCopy IV GX, Stratix II GX, and Stratix GX devices are equipped with built-in transceivers that provide a dedicated mode for implementing the XAUI interface that is available for 10-Gigabit Fibre Channel. This allows for much more efficient implementation of the entire interface in a single device. Embedded within this transceiver are dedicated rate-matching FIFO buffers, 8B/10B encoding and decoding functions, and word alignment functions. Each group of four channels also has built-in channel alignment circuitry to minimize skew across the interface.
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