The ubiquitous micro

26 Jan 2000 DSP, Micros & Memory

Manufacturers of insecticides claim that for every flea you see in your house there are a 100 more hidden out of sight and the same is becoming true of microcontrollers! Unlike fleas however, microcontrollers are making our lives easier, safer and more economical.

Altera has introduced a PCI-X intellectual property (IP) core for programmable logic devices (PLDs). The PCI-X based technology is a compatible extension of the existing PCI (peripheral component interface) bus. The 64 bit PCI-X architecture runs at speeds up to 133 MHz, providing transfer rates above 1 GBps up to four times the speed of the most common PCI bus technology claims Altera. The design of next-generation high bandwidth systems is currently limited by interface throughput, which PCI-X can address.

PCI-X is widely anticipated to be the next standard for I/O interconnect inside servers, as well as more complex system architectures such as switched fabric I/O systems, Gigabit Ethernet, Fiber Channel, Cluster Interconnects, and Internet Protocol Telephony.

"The introduction of the Altera PCI-X MegaCore function is part of our comprehensive PCI strategy, to offer both performance and ease-of-implementation to designers of high bandwidth systems," said Justin Cowling, Altera Senior Intellectual Property Marketing Manager. "This core gives designers a clear path to higher performance and is backwards-compatible with current PCI configurations."

The PCI-X core has been rigorously tested and implemented on several cell-based ASIC devices says Altera.

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