Broadcom HiGig and HiGig+ protocols use an enhanced XAUI physical layer, and tag each packet with a 12-byte HiGig header. HiGig+ extends the range of the XAUI physical layer to 3.75 Gbps, well beyond the 3.125 Gbps required by the XAUI specification. The motivation for these protocols is to add switching functionality, such as Quality Of Service (Q0S) and link aggregation, that are not available with standard XAUI.
Altera® devices that are compliant with the requirements of HiGig and HiGig+ include Stratix® IV GX FPGAs (up to 32 channels at rates up to 8.5 Gbps, and up to 16 additional channels at rates up to 3.2 Gbps), HardCopy® IV GX ASICs (up to 16 channels at rates up to 6.5+ Gbps, and up to 8 additional channels at rates up to 3.2 Gbps), and Stratix II GX FPGAs (up to 20 channels at rates up to 6.375 Gbps). You can use these devices to implement any interface based on XAUI, HiGig, or HiGig+.
