March 7, 2023
The new Agilex 7 family provides a communication rate of up to 1.6Tbps, thanks to an Israeli technology called Barak, based on a very fast ADC converter. The core of the component is manufactured from SuperFin transistors in a 10 nm process
In the photo above: Director of the Analog & Mixed Signals group at Intel, Noam Avni, next to the Agilex 7 component
Intel Corporation (Intel) announced the new family of FPGA components Agilex 7, which was partially developed in Israel and is manufactured from Intel’s new SuperFin transistors in a 10 nm process. The components in the family provide up to 4 million logical units and include internal DSP processors that reach a processing power of up to 38TFLOPS. The main target markets of the Agilex 7 family are optical networks, data centers, broadcast studios, medical testing facilities and 5G networks.
The FPGA component in the new component family was designed by the former Alta Clara, California-based team. The components include transmitters/receivers developed mainly in Israel, which provide a data transfer rate of up to 116Gbps and multi-protocol Ethernet connectivity at a rate of up to 400Gbps. The component’s strong communication infrastructure includes two main components: very fast Ethernet communication, and slower Ethernet communication, but compatible with all the protocols that exist in the market today, including 5G base stations.
Dozens of 400G channels at the same time
The high-speed communication interfaces are based on the Barak communication technology, which was developed in Israel. The manager of the Analog & Mixed Signals group at Intel, Noam Avni, told Techtime that the transmitters and receivers (MCMs) are integrated into components in the form of separate silicon tiles (F-Tile) connected by an internal communication channel to the core component of the FPGA. Avni: “We developed two central communication modules. The first is an Ethernet PHY that allows to provide a communication speed of up to 116Gbps. 16 such channels were installed in the component, so it is able to reach a communication speed of up to 1.6Tbps.
“In addition, we also integrated slower communication modules into the component, which reach a rate of up to 58 Gbps, but they are compatible with almost all communication protocols in the world. When delivering an FPGA component to a customer, we don’t always know what his communication needs will be, so we give him all the options. You can link 8 such channels and receive Ethernet communication at a rate of up to 400G. In practice, there are many such channels within Agilex 7 components, and the customer can operate dozens of 400G channels at the same time.”
The Analog & Mixed Signals group is responsible for the development of all Intel communication solutions. The group currently has about 600 employees worldwide, of which about 250 are in Israel. The main difficulty in the development of the high-speed communication interfaces was the need to filter very high frequency noises, without affecting the power consumption of the receiver. The company overcame the difficulty using “Lightning” technology, which was first revealed about a year ago.
ADC converter noise filter
The core of the technology is the development of a fast ADC converter based on a classic principle: Successive-approximation ADC, also known as SAR. The converter samples the analog signal at a rate of up to 14G Samples per second and also includes a unique and very fast algorithm, which is partly implemented in the hardware and partly implemented through software. “In the laboratory we already have the next generation, which will work at speeds of 200G”.
The “Barak” interface is considered the first silicon in the world that managed to reach these frequencies. It was developed by Intel groups in Haifa and Jerusalem led by Alon Meisler. The multi-protocol interface (known as UX) was jointly developed by the group in Toronto that designed the analog circuits, and the group in Jerusalem that developed the signal processing unit (DSP) that manages it and its algorithms, led by Itai Gur.
Posted in categories: FPGA, News, Semiconductors
Posted in tags: FPGA, Intel
