Altera and Cavium Deliver Pre-Verified Packet Classification Solution for Networking Appliances

Deployment-ready Solution Built with Altera’s Interlaken Look-Aside IP and Cavium’s NEURON Search Processor

San Jose, Calif., June 23, 2014—Altera Corporation (NASDAQ: ALTR) today announced its Interlaken Look-Aside intellectual property (IP) core has been tested and is compatible with Cavium’s NEURON Search™ Processor. This deployment-ready, pre-verified solution provides networking OEMs a low-latency, high-performance packet interface for use in networking appliances, including routers, switches, firewalls, and security storage. The Interlaken Look-Aside IP core is offered today as part of Altera’s portfolio of best-in-class IP cores which are optimized to provide superior performance, latency and area utilization when integrated within Altera’s Arria® 10 and Stratix® V FPGAs.

Altera’s FPGA-based Interlaken Look-Aside solution enables interoperability between a datapath device and a look-aside coprocessor with transfer rates up to 300 Gbps and delivers more than 500 million packets per second performance. In addition to the superior performance, the Interlaken Look-Aside IP is comprised of soft and hardened logic blocks that offer customers a high degree of user interface, lane and data rate configuration flexibility for optimal integration.

Altera and Cavium tested and verified the Interlaken Look-Aside solution using a Stratix V FPGA and a NEURON Search Processor. The low-latency packet interface and scalable storage space provides high performance and high capacity for Access Control List (ACL) and packet classification applications. An interoperability report is available from Altera that describes the testing methods and performance metrics achieved using Altera’s Interlaken Look-Aside IP core interfacing with Cavium’s NEURON Search Processor.

“Altera’s best-in-class IP cores are architected to deliver the highest performance, lowest latency and smallest resource utilization in the industry,” said Alex Grbic, director of software and IP marketing at Altera. “Working together with Cavium to demonstrate interoperability between our products has enabled our customers to use industry-leading solutions with greater confidence.”

Cavium’s NEURON Search Processor family, shipping today in production, targets a wide range of high-performance, L2-L4 network search applications. The search processor family supports up to 1 million IPv4 and IPv6 rules, delivers hundreds of millions of searches per second and consumes less than 20W max power. The NEURON Search Processor provides tremendous flexibility in storing rules and specifying rule table formats.
“Altera and Cavium’s packet classification is a low-risk, high-performance coprocessing solution that our customers require and appreciate,” said Weishan Sun, director of product marketing for Cavium’s NEURON Search Processor Product Line. “Altera’s Interlaken Look-Aside IP with Cavium’s NEURON Search Processor is an easy to integrate solution that allows our customers to rapidly bring-up their boards, saving on costly engineering hours and materials compared to hardware solutions that are not pre-verified.”

Availability
Altera’s Interlaken Look-Aside IP core andinteroperability report are available today from Altera. To receive a copy of the interoperability report, or for questions regarding IP licensing, contact your local Altera sales representative or email interlaken@altera.com.

About Altera
Altera® programmable solutions enable designers of electronic systems to rapidly and cost effectively innovate, differentiate and win in their markets. Altera offers FPGAs, SoCs, CPLDs, ASICs and complementary technologies, such as power management, to provide high-value solutions to customers worldwide.