The importance of storing, maintaining, accessing and recovering data has increased tremendously over the last few years. Information is now considered the most valuable asset for corporations and consumers alike. With the explosion of the Internet and accompanying growth in information-based services, information storage has become critical for guaranteeing products and services. Altera’s HardCopy® series of strucutred ASICs provides a risk-free alternative to standard-cell ASICs for storage applications.
Time-to-Market & Price Pressures
Vendors of storage networking products face time-to-market pressures due to intense competition, which shrinks the design cycles for new products. At the same time, designs are becoming increasingly complex, which implies that first-time success with new product design is difficult to achieve.
Multiple Technology Needs for Data Storage
Several technologies are now relevant for data storage applications. This includes:
- Fabric-attached storage systems
- Storage network infrastructure
- Networking standards and protocols, such as fibre channel, iSCSI, Ethernet, wide area network (WAN) and multi-access network (MAN)
- Bus standards such as PCIX, PCI-Express, Infiniband, and RapidIO
- Support for different operation systems, database and file system architectures
- Chip-to-chip high speed communications standards such as LVDS & SPI 4.2
Figure 1 shows a typical storage network.
Figure 1. Typical Network Storage System
The implementation platform for storage applications must be able to support these multiple technology standards and protocols. The same platform must be flexible and facilitate inter-operability to accommodate the evolution in standards and protocols. Altera® HardCopy devices meet those needs and standards.
HardCopy Solution
HardCopy devices provide a low cost, risk-free alternative to standard cell ASICs for storage applications. Unlike ASICs that have long and complicated development cycles, HardCopy devices are easier to use and provide time-to-market advantages.
HardCopy devices are supported by an FPGA-based platform for design verification and prototyping. Altera offers FPGA devices that are pin-compatible with HardCopy devices. The Quartus® II design software, available from Altera, provides timing, performance and power estimation for HardCopy devices, ahead of silicon availability. This feature shortens the design cycle for HardCopy designs and enables the designer to fully optimize their design.
