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FPGA IP completes solution for wireless backhaul

When used with the company’s WinPath2 processor and PMCSierra’s TEMUX family of framer and mappers, Wintegra’s third-generation Universal Front End (UFE3) IP core for high-channel-density wireless-backhaul designs provides an upgrade path for designers working to migrate voice-centric cellular solutions to high-capacity data-plusvoice- capable designs. Carrier Ethernet is, Wintegra says, becoming the prevalent way of carrying this combined voice and data traffic between cell sites and central offices. Director of technical marketing Gordon Lawton describes wireless-backhaul aggregation as one of the “hot” areas in telecoms at present. The IP core plus Wintegra’s WinPath2 processors at the central office provide bi-directional conversion of 8064 legacy DS0 channels to Gigabit Ethernet, with Carrier Ethernet as the link to remote cell sites. The core enables a fully channelised application running any protocol from a list that includes PWE3 (Pseudo Wire End to End Emulation), MC/ML-PPP (Multi-Class Multi-Link PPP), IMA (Inverse Multiplexing over ATM), or MFR (Multilink Frame Relay).

A typical example that Wintegra quotes takes an OC-12 channel—plus a reserve duplicate channel—from the telecoms network and connects it to the PMC Sierra chip, which interfaces directly to an Altera Stratix II FPGA, where the new IP resides. The programmable chip in turn connects to the WinPath2, which bridges the signal to the Ethernet backplane. Lawton stops short of calling the combined offering a reference design because, he says, designers working in this space invariably produce solutions tailored to a particular specifi cation; to that end, the IP core allows them to work with TDM interfaces and channel densities from 24xT1/E1, 1xOC-3/STM-1, 2xOC- 3/STM-1 and up to 4xOC-3/STM-1 or 1xOC-12/STM-4, providing a glueless interface to PMC-Sierra devices—including its latest TEMUX 336 and TEMUX 168 devices, which integrate 4xOC-3/STM-1 or OC-12/STM-4 and 2xOC-3/STM-1 framer and mappers, respectively.

Wintegra supplies the UFE3 soft core for a per-project fee, in source code. A reference board is available from Wintegra, featuring Altera’s Stratix II FPGA and PMCSierra’s TEMUX 336.

Wintegra, www.wintegra.com.
PMC Sierra, www.pmc-sierra.com.